The United States is undergoing a demographic shift in which the white population is aging while the younger generation grows more diverse. Although population estimates predict that white Americans will make up less than 50 percent of the population by 2045, nonwhite public school students already comprise more than 50 percent of the student body. This accelerated shift in the racial and ethnic composition of public schools, coupled with research showing the benefitsto students from having nonwhite teachers, implies an acute need to diversify the teaching profession.

In light of these quickly changing demographics, our new report published through Brookings Mountain West delves into the diversity of the teacher workforce in the Mountain West region. The states in this region (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah) have experienced rapid population growth and a substantial influx of nonwhite racial and ethnic groups in recent decades. These features put them at the vanguard of demographic change that the nation as a whole will be facing in coming years, and they make the region an interesting case study of teacher diversity—offering lessons to policymakers looking to diversify the workforce in the face of continued demographic change.

Growing racial diversity creates growing demand for teacher diversity

In the report, we use five waves of the Schools and Staffing Survey and the 2016 American Community Survey to plot student and teacher demographic trends from 1993 to 2016 in the Mountain West states. These trends show how the diversity in the teacher workforce has evolved slowly as the student population has changed more rapidly.

Figure 1: Student and teacher demographics in the Mountain West

The charts in the top row of Figure 1 show that in all five states the share of nonwhite students, particularly Hispanics, has increased over the past 20-plus years. Both the initial share of Hispanic students and their growth rate varies by state. For example, the share of Hispanic students in New Mexico has always been large, accounting for nearly half of all students in 1993, and the growth of this group’s share has been positive but modest over the last 25 years. Meanwhile, Hispanic students in Nevada accounted for less than 20 percent of students in 1993, and this subgroup has seen dramatic growth since then, now constituting nearly 50 percent of all students.

Looking now at the share of nonwhite teachers across the bottom of Figure 1, we again see different trends arising across states. Due to the adult population being much more white than the rising generation of children under 18, it is not surprising that the teacher workforce is more white than the student body they serve in each of the five states. The trends presented here show that in all states nonwhite teachers are a scarce resource. However, some states are performing better on teacher diversity than others. While New Mexico and Arizona are leading the region, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah are struggling to keep pace with changes in the student population.

Next, we explore how the Mountain West states are doing in their recruitment and retention of nonwhite teachers in comparison to white applicants and the rest of the U.S. We find two noteworthy ways in which the Mountain West is clearly lagging behind.

First, a major source of diverse teachers in the rest of the U.S. is growing less racially diverse in Mountain West states. Alternative certification programs have been documented as a key source for attracting nonwhite and male applicants into the profession; however, we find that states in the Mountain West are diverging from this general pattern. Figure 2 shows the percentage of novice teachers (with three or fewer years of experience) who have entered teaching through a non-traditional route.

Nonwhite entry rates through alternative certification sit notably lower in the Mountain West states than in the rest of the U.S. In 2015, 20 percent of nonwhite novice teachers in the Mountain West enter the profession through non-traditional pathways, while 40 percent did in the rest of the country. Moreover, alternative entry rates in these states have declined among minorities and increased among whites such that their relative positions have reversed by 2015. By comparison, these entry rates are essentially flat in the rest of the U.S. for the eight-year span of these surveys. It is unclear why this source of racial diversity in the rest of the U.S. is becoming less diverse in the Mountain West states, but these trends warrant closer scrutiny if states intend to make progress toward parity in the region.

Second, we find evidence that nonwhite teachers leave Mountain West schools at elevated rates. In Figure 3 we show that the rate at which nonwhite teachers in the region left the profession in the 2012-13 school year is nearly three times higher than the one observed among both white teachers in the region and nonwhite teachers in the rest of the U.S. Though not pictured here, it’s worth noting that rates of moving between schools is equal for nonwhite teachers in both the Mountain West and the rest of the U.S. (11 percent). Thus, the high attrition rate observed in the Mountain West is not countered with lower mobility across schools and appears to be excessively high attrition unique to the region.

Figure 3: Percent of teachers who leave the profession

We have previously documented that attrition rates for nonwhite teachers are higher than attrition rates for white teachers in the U.S. Figure 3 suggests that attrition gaps in the Mountain West region alone may be responsible for these nationwide gaps. Whether it is creating more supportive work environments for nonwhite teachers, paying teachers in high-need schools more (which will benefit the disproportionately nonwhite teachers in them), or any other number of strategies, something clearly must be done to counter the hemorrhaging of nonwhite teachers from Mountain West classrooms.

Finally, though the demographic shifts in the Mountain West region are more acute than those observed in most other states, they are not unique to the region. Indeed, we expect that eventually most states in the rest of the country will face similar demographic transitions in their populations, though perhaps on a slower timeline. As a result, states across the country will need to work through multiple avenues if they seek to not simply keep pace with student diversity, but also intend to move closer to racial parity between teachers and students.

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By Michael Hansen, Diana Quintero
The United States is undergoing a demographic shift in which the white population is aging while the younger generation grows more diverse. Although population estimates predict that white Americans will make up less than 50 percent of the population by 2045, nonwhite public school students already comprise more than 50 percent of the student body. This accelerated shift in the racial and ethnic composition of public schools, coupled with research showing the benefits to students from having nonwhite teachers, implies an acute need to diversify the teaching profession.
In light of these quickly changing demographics, our new report published through Brookings Mountain West delves into the diversity of the teacher workforce in the Mountain West region. The states in this region (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah) have experienced rapid population growth and a substantial influx of nonwhite racial and ethnic groups in recent decades. These features put them at the vanguard of demographic change that the nation as a whole will be facing in coming years, and they make the region an interesting case study of teacher diversity—offering lessons to policymakers looking to diversify the workforce in the face of continued demographic change.
Growing racial diversity creates growing demand for teacher diversity
In the report, we use five waves of the Schools and Staffing Survey and the 2016 American Community Survey to plot student and teacher demographic trends from 1993 to 2016 in the Mountain West states. These trends show how the diversity in the teacher workforce has evolved slowly as the student population has changed more rapidly.
Figure 1: Student and teacher demographics in the Mountain West
The charts in the top row of Figure 1 show that in all five states the share of nonwhite students, particularly Hispanics, has increased over the past 20-plus years. Both the initial share of Hispanic students and their growth rate varies by state. For example, the share of Hispanic students in New Mexico has always been large, accounting for nearly half of all students in 1993, and the growth of this group’s share has been positive but modest over the last 25 years. Meanwhile, Hispanic students in Nevada accounted for less than 20 percent of students in 1993, and this subgroup has seen dramatic growth since then, now constituting nearly 50 percent of all students.
Looking now at the share of nonwhite teachers across the bottom of Figure 1, we again see different trends arising across states. Due to the adult population being much more white than the rising generation of children under 18, it is not surprising that the teacher workforce is more white than the student body they serve in each of the five states. The trends presented here show that in all states nonwhite teachers are a scarce resource. However, some states are performing better on teacher diversity than others. While New Mexico and Arizona are leading the region, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah are struggling to keep pace with changes in the student population.
Next, we explore how the Mountain West states are doing in their recruitment and retention of nonwhite teachers in comparison to white applicants and the rest of the U.S. We find two noteworthy ways in which the Mountain West is clearly lagging behind.
First, a major source of diverse teachers in the rest of the U.S. is growing less racially diverse in Mountain West states. Alternative certification programs have been documented as a key source for attracting nonwhite and male applicants into the profession; however, we find that states in the Mountain West are diverging from this general pattern. Figure 2 shows the percentage of novice teachers (with three or fewer years of experience) who have entered teaching through a non-traditional route.
Figure 2: Percent of novice teachers entering through non-traditional pathways
Nonwhite entry rates ... By Michael Hansen, Diana Quintero
The United States is undergoing a demographic shift in which the white population is aging while the younger generation grows more diverse. Although population estimates predict that white Americans will make up ... https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2018/12/14/want-more-diverse-teachers-in-more-places-start-with-diverse-principals/Want more diverse teachers in more places? Start with diverse principalshttp://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/586539404/0/brookingsrss/topics/k12education/
Fri, 14 Dec 2018 18:54:31 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?p=553169

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By Peter Goff

The inequitable distribution of teachers is among the largest and most pervasive challenges facing American schools. A host of studies has shown that stronger teachers—as measured by experience, credentials, education, teaching practices, and student growth—are more likely to be found working with students who are affluent and white. We have found these distributional asymmetries across districts, among schools in the same district, and even within schools.

As illustrated in other posts on the Brown Center Chalkboard, these distributional maladies are also present when we consider characteristics beyond instructional efficacy, such as teacher race. Black and Hispanic teachers are in short supply and are often clustered within a small proportion of schools and districts. Being taught by a diverse group of teachers benefits all students, with the greatest returns manifesting for low-income and Minoritized students.[1]Such benefits extend beyond human capital when we consider the democratic aims of education, where exposure to diverse and wide-ranging ideas, people, and experiences provide the foundation for students to develop the skills of civic discourse. A diverse faculty plays a critical role in supporting multiple goals central to our educational system.

Representative bureaucracy and the distribution of teacher race

Given the established benefits to having a diverse teacher workforce distributed equitably across schools and students, what is causing teachers—particularly Minoritized teachers—to be distributed as they are? A better understanding of the underlying mechanism allows us to select the optimal policy levers to disrupt these trends.

In our newly released paper examining this question, Minseok Yang, Yasmin Rodriguez-Escutia, and I constructed a dataset comprised of more than 70,000 applications (more than 12,000 unique teachers) to about 2,000 teaching vacancies across 352 (of 425) districts in Wisconsin. We used this to gain an unprecedented glimpse into the teacher sorting process that occurs as teachers apply to and move among schools.

We motivated our study by incorporating the theory of representative bureaucracy (based off of Samuel Krislov’s book of the same name), which hypothesizes that people are more likely to work in organizations led and managed by people with whom they may have shared similar life experiences. In schools, this manifests as Minoritized teachers being more likely to work in schools where they see other Minoritized educators in leadership positions. The logic is that Minoritized teachers face unique social and professional pressures; schools with Minoritized leaders are likely to understand these pressures and can provide a teaching environment in which Minoritized teachers can feel safe, supported, and prepared to excel.

Racial matching and job seeking

In our analyses, we sought to determine how teacher-principal race congruence relates to how likely a teacher may be to (a) search for other positions and (b) leave their current school. We next explored if teachers were any more likely to apply to vacancies in schools led by a principal with whom they shared the same race. Lastly, we asked if teacher-principal race congruence was predictive of hiring, conditional on those teachers who applied to the vacancy.

Overall, we found compelling evidence that teacher-principal race congruence is a significant factor that moderates how teachers select the schools in which they work. As shown in the figure below, teachers working with a different-race principal are twice as likely to search for other positions. While teacher-principal race matching reduces search rates among all teachers, this racial congruence effect is most pronounced for pairings of Minoritized teachers and Minoritized principals. And this effect holds even after controlling for multiple teacher characteristics and school factors, including student demographics.

Figure: Marginal probabilities (effects) of searching in the labor market based on principal-teacher race congruence

We also found that teachers were more likely to apply to vacancies where they are of the same race as their potential principal. Here too, the effects are greater for congruence among minority educators than for their white colleagues. Importantly, we found no evidence to support that Minoritized principals are any more or less likely to hire Minoritized teachers than are their white colleagues.

Diverse leadership can help diversify more schools

Our findings provide the strongest empirical evidence to date that the sorting of Minoritized teachers among schools is strongly related to the race of the principal leading the school. This leads us to believe that one strategy to diversify our teaching workforce across more schools is to increase the recruitment and/or promotion of Minoritized school leaders. If representative bureaucracy is underlying Minoritized teachers’ propensity to seek schools led by Minoritized principals, we should also consider how white principals can signal that they are aware of the challenges facing Minoritized teachers, and their school will provide a responsive and prosperous professional culture.

While our work informs strategies to remediate the maldistribution of Minoritized teachers, we cannot ignore that we face a severe shortage of Minoritized teachers. In Wisconsin, for example, 21 percent of all students are black or Hispanic as compared to less than 4 percent of all teachers. 74 percent (!) of Wisconsin schools employ zero teachers of color. Statewide, Minoritized teachers are too few and segregated across districts. This level of segregation merits our attention, yet policies to improve the distribution of Minoritized teachers may produce the unintended consequence of inducing a sense of racial or ethnic isolation. Extreme distributional balance in Wisconsin would result in only one Minoritized teacher per school. Such an event may well accelerate attrition from the field. When considering initiatives to diversify our teachers and principals, we also need to be proactive in our efforts to increase the numbers of Minoritized individuals entering teacher education programs and matriculating into the teaching workforce. Supply challenges are inextricably linked to distributional ones and strategies to address one must be cognizant of the potential impact on the other if we want to move the dial on these critical issues.

The racial diversity of teachers matters to policymakers, and our work shows that the race of principals has a clear impact on teachers’ labor market decisions as well. If we want to create schools that welcome all of our increasingly diverse students, we need to think about racial diversity for school leaders in addition to teachers.

Footnote

[1] Both in our paper and in this article, our use of the term “Minoritized” rather than racial or ethnic minority is intentional. The term “minority” is a neutral term on its face, describing the relative sizes of nonwhite racial and ethnic groups relative to the majority (i.e., whites). Yet, this term is inadequate because it fails to convey that these nonwhite groups have poorer social outcomes not simply because of their size relative to whites, but because they have often been marginalized and mistreated in society. We feel “Minoritized” more accurately conveys the notion that their lower social status is the result of historical oppression. (Back to top)

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By Peter Goff
The inequitable distribution of teachers is among the largest and most pervasive challenges facing American schools. A host of studies has shown that stronger teachers—as measured by experience, credentials, education, teaching practices, and student growth—are more likely to be found working with students who are affluent and white. We have found these distributional asymmetries across districts, among schools in the same district, and even within schools.
As illustrated in other posts on the Brown Center Chalkboard, these distributional maladies are also present when we consider characteristics beyond instructional efficacy, such as teacher race. Black and Hispanic teachers are in short supply and are often clustered within a small proportion of schools and districts. Being taught by a diverse group of teachers benefits all students, with the greatest returns manifesting for low-income and Minoritized students.[1] Such benefits extend beyond human capital when we consider the democratic aims of education, where exposure to diverse and wide-ranging ideas, people, and experiences provide the foundation for students to develop the skills of civic discourse. A diverse faculty plays a critical role in supporting multiple goals central to our educational system.
Representative bureaucracy and the distribution of teacher race
Given the established benefits to having a diverse teacher workforce distributed equitably across schools and students, what is causing teachers—particularly Minoritized teachers—to be distributed as they are? A better understanding of the underlying mechanism allows us to select the optimal policy levers to disrupt these trends.
In our newly released paper examining this question, Minseok Yang, Yasmin Rodriguez-Escutia, and I constructed a dataset comprised of more than 70,000 applications (more than 12,000 unique teachers) to about 2,000 teaching vacancies across 352 (of 425) districts in Wisconsin. We used this to gain an unprecedented glimpse into the teacher sorting process that occurs as teachers apply to and move among schools.
We motivated our study by incorporating the theory of representative bureaucracy (based off of Samuel Krislov’s book of the same name), which hypothesizes that people are more likely to work in organizations led and managed by people with whom they may have shared similar life experiences. In schools, this manifests as Minoritized teachers being more likely to work in schools where they see other Minoritized educators in leadership positions. The logic is that Minoritized teachers face unique social and professional pressures; schools with Minoritized leaders are likely to understand these pressures and can provide a teaching environment in which Minoritized teachers can feel safe, supported, and prepared to excel.
Racial matching and job seeking
In our analyses, we sought to determine how teacher-principal race congruence relates to how likely a teacher may be to (a) search for other positions and (b) leave their current school. We next explored if teachers were any more likely to apply to vacancies in schools led by a principal with whom they shared the same race. Lastly, we asked if teacher-principal race congruence was predictive of hiring, conditional on those teachers who applied to the vacancy.
Overall, we found compelling evidence that teacher-principal race congruence is a significant factor that moderates how teachers select the schools in which they work. As shown in the figure below, teachers working with a different-race principal are twice as likely to search for other positions. While teacher-principal race matching reduces search rates among all teachers, this racial congruence effect is most pronounced for pairings of Minoritized teachers and Minoritized principals. And this effect holds even after controlling for multiple teacher ... By Peter Goff
The inequitable distribution of teachers is among the largest and most pervasive challenges facing American schools. A host of studies has shown that stronger teachers—as measured by experience, credentials, education, teaching ... https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2018/11/26/school-leadership-an-untapped-opportunity-to-draw-young-people-of-color-into-teaching/School leadership: An untapped opportunity to draw young people of color into teachinghttp://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/582329554/0/brookingsrss/topics/k12education/
Mon, 26 Nov 2018 19:56:25 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?p=549706

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By Michael Hansen, Diana Quintero

School leaders serve many critical roles in their schools. They split their time between supporting their teacher workforce, communicating with parents, working with the district office, and managing all of the operational processes to keep the school open day to day. A demanding job, school leaders often work nearly 60-hour weeks, filled with challenges ranging from layers of bureaucratic and policy requirements to regular criticism from parents or employees.

Given the importance and visibility of school leaders, it is important to consider the racial and ethnic diversity of this group of educators. Administrators of color bring a number of unique strengths: More frequent exposure to people of color in authoritative positions can replace stereotyping and unconscious biases with acceptance and trust; leaders of color have a distinct advantage when interacting with community members that share their racial or ethnic background; and finally, leaders of color can contribute nuance and perspective for academic programs targeting students of color. As public schools increasingly serve more students of color, states and districts should also make a diverse corpus of principals a priority.

In this installment of our ongoing teacher diversity series, we examine diversity among school leaders. Because leading a classroom is nearly a universal prerequisite to leading a school, we were unsurprised to see large diversity gaps between principals of color and the students they serve, roughly mirroring what we observe among teachers.

We were surprised, however, to learn that opportunities for leadership in schools are significantly stronger for black and Hispanic groups in comparison to leadership opportunities in other industries. In other words, our results imply that opportunities for leadership could be a strength of the teaching profession. These opportunities just might help attract young people of color into it the teaching profession, if we can get the word out.

Diversity among school leadership

Throughout this post, we paint a picture of the pool of public school leaders using data from the 2016 American Community Survey (ACS).[1] The “education administrator” occupation code we use includes public school principals and assistant principals. The following table presents a few summary statistics of the demographic composition of those in this occupation, as well as comparison data against public school teachers and students.

Table 1: Demographic breakdown of administrators, teachers, and students

Race/ethnicity

Administrators

Teachers

Students

White

75.1%

80.1%

50.3%

Black

12.9%

7.7%

14.4%

Hispanic

8.6%

8.3%

25.2%

Other races

3.4%

3.9%

10.0%

Source: Authors’ calculations based on the American Community Survey, 2016; 5-year estimates.

We see a significant degree of racial mismatch between school administrators and the students in their care—just half of students are white, but three-fourths of administrators are. The overrepresentation of whites among administrators roughly mirrors the overrepresentation among teachers (80 percent), a near-universal antecedent to school leadership.

In fact, overrepresentation of white teachers and administrators likely dates back to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. In the decade after the case, due to black schools closing and discrimination against black administrators, an estimated 90 percent of black principals in the South lost their jobs. The simultaneous loss of 38,000 black teachers during that same era meant the loss of a potential next generation of leadership. Encouragingly, though, the representation of black school leaders has rebounded somewhat (12.9 percent), and is now closer to student (14.4 percent) representation than that seen among teachers (7.7 percent); though this is not true of other racial subgroups.

One way to cut this data is to look at the ratio of school leaders to teachers for each demographic group. For reasons that will be clear in just a moment, we create these ratios of leaders to teachers by race and gender. Figure 1 below plots these ratios across racial and ethnic subgroups in the data. Higher values here suggest greater opportunities for advancement into leadership within schools from the teacher ranks. For example, at the high end there are two black male leaders for every nine black male teachers in the survey, resulting in a leader:teacher ratio of 0.22. Incidentally, white women have the lowest ratio, with one administrator for about every 16 teachers.

Taking a step back to look at general patterns in this figure, two points are noteworthy. First, men have higher leader:teacher ratios than women across all racial and ethnic categories. Though it is discouraging to see men advancing more readily into administration than women, particularly in a female-dominated profession as teaching is, it is consistent with prior research evidenceon the topic.

Second, and more surprising to us, is that both black men and women show the highest leader:teacher ratios in their respective gender categories. Both black men and women are more strongly represented among the ranks of school leadership than among the teacher workforce, suggesting particularly strong prospects of upward career advancement for teachers in these subgroups. The other three racial and ethnic groups have roughly equivalent ratios (within gender).

Leadership in schools versus other industries

The leader:teacher ratio above is a proxy for upward advancement within the industry; however, it is possible that other industries offer different, perhaps even better options for advancement into management for some groups that public education does not. The ACS data we use for this analysis also allows us to examine how the demographics of managers in other industries compare against leaders in public schools.

For the following analysis, we examine the demographics of those working in management roles in health care, social services, and postsecondary education. We choose these three industries as they are complementary public-service-oriented fields that, like K-12 schools, typically require a bachelor’s degree and occupational license to enter these fields (and typically a higher degree to move into leadership). Though school leadership certainly takes a unique set of skills, we expect many of these skills to be shared with managers in these complementary industries, and therefore could be viewed as a reasonable approximation of leadership opportunities outside of public schools for those considering a career in public education.

Figure 2 presents a ratio of school leaders to managers in these other fields by race and gender subgroups. Overall, we observe three school leaders in the data for every seven managers in other occupations, or a school leader:manager ratio of 0.3—the fact that this value is less than one is reasonable, as we are pooling leaders in one sector against those in multiple industries.

This 0.3 ratio could be considered a baseline for comparison—higher values among specific subgroups suggest more likely advancement into management in public schools, whereas lower values suggest greater opportunities exist outside of public schools. Specifically, white women as well as men and women of the catch-all “Other” category (predominantly Asians) show values below this 0.3 reference point, suggesting their opportunities to lead are likely higher in these other industries.

On the other hand, both men and women in the black and Hispanic categories (and white men) score well above this 0.3 comparison line. These ratios suggest black and Hispanic individuals who are weighing a career in public schools against these complementary sectors have better upward mobility prospects in public education.

Promote school leadership to attract more young people of color into schools

Summing up our findings, we see ratios of school leaders to teachers that put black teachers at a distinct advantage in moving into school leadership. And when comparing against other industries, both black and Hispanic individuals are more strongly represented among leadership in K-12 public schools compared to management in other complementary industries. Yes, people of color continue to be disproportionately underrepresented in school leadership, though this appears to be more a function of the pipeline into teaching, not into leadership.

We interpret these data as pointing to strong career opportunities for black and Hispanic individuals in public education. Yet, to our knowledge, opportunities for career advancement are not part of the recruitment strategies to attract more nonwhite teachers to the profession. We believe they should be, as it could be a powerful strategy for increasing diversity in two distinct ways.

First, when teaching is advertised as the first step in a career in schools with opportunities for moving up (rather than a flat career trajectory typically assumed), many young people of color may be more attracted to the profession. Second, when incoming teachers are diverse and subsequently ascend into leadership, their influence is multiplied: School leaders of color have their own unique influence on hiring and staffing decisions, often resulting in greater attraction and retention among teachers of color. Leaders of color have been shown to even tap teachers of color to nudge them toward school leadership.

In other words, diverse teachers are the direct inputs into a diverse pool of school leaders. Once they lead, they promote diverse teachers. Rinse and repeat.

Bethany Kirkpatrick and Kimberly Truong contributed to this post.

Footnote

We isolate survey respondents who report working full time as an education administrator. The ACS is designed to be a representative sample of U.S. households, not necessarily the pool of public school administrators. We compared the demographics of school administrators in the ACS to those reported in the 2015-16 National Teacher and Principal Survey—a survey designed to be representative of school principals—and found nearly perfect alignment on race, age, and gender. (Back to top)

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By Michael Hansen, Diana Quintero
School leaders serve many critical roles in their schools. They split their time between supporting their teacher workforce, communicating with parents, working with the district office, and managing all of the operational processes to keep the school open day to day. A demanding job, school leaders often work nearly 60-hour weeks, filled with challenges ranging from layers of bureaucratic and policy requirements to regular criticism from parents or employees.
Given the importance and visibility of school leaders, it is important to consider the racial and ethnic diversity of this group of educators. Administrators of color bring a number of unique strengths: More frequent exposure to people of color in authoritative positions can replace stereotyping and unconscious biases with acceptance and trust; leaders of color have a distinct advantage when interacting with community members that share their racial or ethnic background; and finally, leaders of color can contribute nuance and perspective for academic programs targeting students of color. As public schools increasingly serve more students of color, states and districts should also make a diverse corpus of principals a priority.
In this installment of our ongoing teacher diversity series, we examine diversity among school leaders. Because leading a classroom is nearly a universal prerequisite to leading a school, we were unsurprised to see large diversity gaps between principals of color and the students they serve, roughly mirroring what we observe among teachers.
We were surprised, however, to learn that opportunities for leadership in schools are significantly stronger for black and Hispanic groups in comparison to leadership opportunities in other industries. In other words, our results imply that opportunities for leadership could be a strength of the teaching profession. These opportunities just might help attract young people of color into it the teaching profession, if we can get the word out.
Diversity among school leadership
Throughout this post, we paint a picture of the pool of public school leaders using data from the 2016 American Community Survey (ACS).[1] The “education administrator” occupation code we use includes public school principals and assistant principals. The following table presents a few summary statistics of the demographic composition of those in this occupation, as well as comparison data against public school teachers and students.
Table 1: Demographic breakdown of administrators, teachers, and students
White
75.1%
80.1%
50.3%
Black
12.9%
7.7%
14.4%
Hispanic
8.6%
8.3%
25.2%
Other races
3.4%
3.9%
10.0%
Source: Authors’ calculations based on the American Community Survey, 2016; 5-year estimates.
We see a significant degree of racial mismatch between school administrators and the students in their care—just half of students are white, but three-fourths of administrators are. The overrepresentation of whites among administrators roughly mirrors the overrepresentation among teachers (80 percent), a near-universal antecedent to school leadership.
In fact, overrepresentation of white teachers and administrators likely dates back to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. In the decade after the case, due to black schools closing and discrimination against black administrators, an estimated 90 percent of black principals in the South lost their jobs. The simultaneous loss of 38,000 black teachers during that same era meant the loss of a potential next generation of leadership. Encouragingly, though, the representation of black school leaders has rebounded somewhat (12.9 percent), and is now closer to student (14.4 percent) representation than that seen among teachers (7.7 percent); though this is not true of other racial subgroups.
One way to cut this data is to look at the ratio of school leaders ... By Michael Hansen, Diana Quintero
School leaders serve many critical roles in their schools. They split their time between supporting their teacher workforce, communicating with parents, working with the district office, and managing all of the ... https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2018/11/08/does-more-policing-make-middle-schools-safer/Does more policing make middle schools safer?http://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/579152468/0/brookingsrss/topics/k12education/
Thu, 08 Nov 2018 18:12:54 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?p=547115

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By Kenneth Alonzo Anderson

School resource officers (SROs), law enforcement personnel that are responsible for safety and crime prevention in schools, have been in place for more than six decades. In the wake of high-profile school shootings, SROs are receiving renewed attention as integral components of school safety strategies. Despite widespread usage, we know very little about whether safety outcomes improve because of SROs.

In a recent study, I rigorously evaluated the effectiveness of Senate Bill 402, Section 8.36, passed by the General Assembly of North Carolina, a grant program that provided selected school districts with $2 for every $1 spent to hire or train SROs in elementary and middle schools. Specifically, I compared disciplinary acts of 460 middle schools over a seven-year period (some of which received the matching funds, and some of which did not), before and after the policy was implemented. I used several statistical techniques to make “apples-to-apples” comparisons of school safety outcomes.

When describing their SRO grant program, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction offered the following position statement: “Students gain trust in law enforcement by interacting positively with their school’s SRO, and SROs provide both a deterrent to violence and a first response to events if they should occur.” Here, I discuss how my evaluation of this grant program adds to our knowledge of the effect of SROs and offer several policy recommendations based on this work.

Previous research on school resource officers

Despite the North Carolina position statement, research shows that increased frequencies of interactions between students and SROs were not related to feelings of safety at school. Rather, student experiences at school were better predictors of feeling of safety. Males, students who have strong connectedness with schools, and students who had positive attitudes towards SROs reported feeling safer in schools. However, females, African-American students, and students who have experienced various forms of school violence, such as fights, arguments, bullying, or religious teasing, reported feeling less safe in schools, even though SROs were present.

There is evidence that SROs can build good relationships with students. For example, positive student outcomes were achieved when North Carolina SROs went above the call of duty to coach a middle school basketball team when no one else was available. Contrarily, there are also countless viral videos from around the country of SROs physically abusing youth for minor incidents, some of which have led to lawsuits and now permeate the minds of young adolescents.

Lessons from a new study

Based on my study of the North Carolina SRO matching grant program, described above, here are four lessons learned for initiating successful school safety policy and practices.

Lesson 1: Increasing investments in school resource officers does not lead to safer schools.

The position statement mentioned above asserts that SROs provide a deterrent to violence. Is this really true?

When comparing schools within districts that received additional funding for SROs to schools within districts that did not, I found no relationships between additional dollars received and reductions in the 16 disciplinary acts that must be reported to the state. Some of the 16 disciplinary outcomes include various forms of assault, homicide, bomb threats, possession and use of alcohol and drugs, possession of weapons, and more.

Approximately $23 million taxpayer dollars were spent to supplement local district funding for SROs in North Carolina between 2013 and 2017. During the 2013-2017 period, the annual amounts represented less than 1 percent of the state’s budget. Relatively speaking, the dollar amounts were not excessive. Yet, in 2018-2019, $12 million dollars of a new $35 million dollar grant were appropriated for school resource officer grants in North Carolina for elementary and middle schools. Such increases in school safety investments must be supported with evidence and not just ideology.

I agree with a National Association of School Resource Officers report that notes that it is “difficult to inventory all that an SRO can do for a campus and its surrounding community.” Moreover, it is certainly inappropriate to quantify the costs of saving lives, which school resource officers have done. However, it is also important to examine how doubling down with more SROs can have negative, life-altering effects for students.

For example, there is evidence of racial disparities in arrests by SROs. Two juvenile judges found that student arrests and juvenile court referrals increase when SROs are present in schools. It is important to acknowledge that increased arrests do not necessarily mean that schools are safer. These judges also noted that a primary responsibility of police officers is to make arrests when there is probable cause. These probable cause judgments may be contributing to disparities in law enforcement referrals for specific racial groups. Indeed, another recent report found major disparities in school-based arrests of black and white students in North Carolina.

Lesson 2: School characteristics explain only a small portion of differences in disciplinary outcomes.

In my study, I incorporated a technique known as multilevel modeling to isolate how much variation in disciplinary acts can be explained by differences between schools within districts versus non-school based factors. The model showed that for schools that reported at least one disciplinary act, approximately 15 percent of the differences in disciplinary outcomes can be explained by differences in school-based characteristics, whereas approximately 85 percent of the differences in disciplinary acts by school are explained by non-school factors. In other words, if SROs did their jobs completely and flawlessly, there are still a host of variables outside of the schooling context that contribute to school safety issues. Although I did not study outside factors, some outside predictors could include neighborhood and social conditions, prior histories of abuse, participation in online hate groups, and more. In other words, school safety is not just a problem that can be addressed in schooling contexts.

Lesson 3: School size (enrollment) and academic achievement are strong predictors of school safety.

I found that the 16 disciplinary outcomes did improve in North Carolina, as a whole, over time, but these improvements were not related to increased SRO funding. My models predicted that if total school enrollment increased by 10 percent, then disciplinary acts would likely increase between 8.4 percent and 10 percent if all other factors in the model remained the same. On the other hand, if grade-level proficiency increased by 5 percent, then the models predicted that disciplinary acts would likely decrease by approximately 20 percent. In short, large or underachieving middle schools are likely to have more safety concerns, regardless of the racial makeup. Thus, alternative investments in smaller middle schools and strategies for improving learning outcomes might accomplish greater school safety outcomes.

Lesson 4. Race is a poor predictor of school safety, and better reporting practices are needed.

The annual report of crime and suspensions submitted to the General Assembly of North Carolina places a heavy emphasis on disaggregating data by race and gender. However, no data are disaggregated by achievement levels. In my models, I simultaneously evaluated grade-level proficiency indicators and racial composition of schools, finding that racial composition of schools is not predictive of school safety in middle school.

These findings show that when reporting disciplinary data by race, without considering other issues, such as achievement levels, race may appear to be a stronger predictor of school safety outcomes than it really is. Future reports should disaggregate safety outcomes by achievement levels and school size. Moreover, when reporting disciplinary statistics, reports should combine race and gender with achievement levels, to compare, for example, disciplinary acts between high-achieving versus low-achieving students across race and gender. This puts the focus back on the primary purpose of schools, education, and its relationship to discipline outcomes, rather than solely focusing on race and gender.

Conclusion

Legislative activity increases after school shootings occur, but rushed school safety legislation may be ineffective. The North Carolina bill, along with similar laws in other states, was passed shortly after the 2012 Newtown tragedy. After traumatic events occur, those who are affected are often outraged, frightened, and devastated, creating an appetite for policy changes. These short periods are known as policy windows.

When policy windows open, the windows are often short, and the legislative process can move rapidly. For example, in the month after the Parkland school shooting tragedy occurred on Feb. 14, 2018, four school safety bills were introduced by Congress. These four bills, described in detail here, primarily focus on reducing gun violence and are clearly reactionary to the Parkland tragedy. However, thoughtful school safety policy should be carefully crafted over time rather than being motivated solely by high-profile events. School safety policy must not solely focus on mass acts of violence, but should embrace a broader perspective of school safety, which includes developmentally appropriate interventions and physical and psychological safety.

Legislators often focus on protections from gun violence, which is indeed important, but as shown by the 16 mandatory discipline acts, school safety extends beyond gun violence. Given evidence that increasing funding for SROs does not have an effect on school safety, as measured by reported disciplinary acts, SRO philosophies should be re-evaluated.

North Carolina views SROs as a comprehensive resource for schools in which they serve many roles. A National Association of School Resource Officers report also asserts that SROs should serve multiple roles and “contribute to the safe-schools team by ensuring a safe and secure campus, educating students about law-related topics, and mentoring students as counselors and role models.” I think that comprehensive uses of SROs are idealistic and perhaps overstated. Teachers and other school personnel have regular contact with students and can provide more comprehensive support to students than SROs.

I advocate for a minimalist versus comprehensive approach when employing SROs (think Secret Service or Air Marshals). Not all may agree with my recommendation, but all organizations should re-evaluate their purposes from time to time. A minimalist approach to SRO use, such as having the officers focus on preventing mass acts of violence, and other negotiated duties, while limiting day-to-day interactions with students, might reduce juvenile arrests. Minimizing school resource involvement is especially critical in a middle-grades context because young adolescents are experiencing rapid biological, social, moral, and emotional changes. A concern with increased SRO use is that poor decisionmaking, on the part of young adolescents, could be criminalized, when, in fact, other types of developmental support is needed.

My findings indicate that policies to increase school safety must address the complexity of school safety, including factors outside of schooling contexts, and should extend beyond popular single-item solutions, such as increased policing or increased mental health support. In North Carolina, more than 60 middle schools per year report zero discipline acts (that are required to be reported to the state). Rather than doubling down on SRO use to improve safety, resources could also be used to interview students and staff, systematically study neighborhood and social conditions of the schools that regularly report zero acts, and share strategies from the schools that report zero acts with more challenging schools.

Overall, legislators and school leaders must distinguish between real versus perceived safety strategies. Evaluation of safety legislation must be pursued with the same vigor as public announcements of safety legislation. Otherwise, public announcements of school safety legislation, without proper evaluation plans, could be construed as political banter.

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By Kenneth Alonzo Anderson
School resource officers (SROs), law enforcement personnel that are responsible for safety and crime prevention in schools, have been in place for more than six decades. In the wake of high-profile school shootings, SROs are receiving renewed attention as integral components of school safety strategies. Despite widespread usage, we know very little about whether safety outcomes improve because of SROs.
In a recent study, I rigorously evaluated the effectiveness of Senate Bill 402, Section 8.36, passed by the General Assembly of North Carolina, a grant program that provided selected school districts with $2 for every $1 spent to hire or train SROs in elementary and middle schools. Specifically, I compared disciplinary acts of 460 middle schools over a seven-year period (some of which received the matching funds, and some of which did not), before and after the policy was implemented. I used several statistical techniques to make “apples-to-apples” comparisons of school safety outcomes.
When describing their SRO grant program, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction offered the following position statement: “Students gain trust in law enforcement by interacting positively with their school’s SRO, and SROs provide both a deterrent to violence and a first response to events if they should occur.” Here, I discuss how my evaluation of this grant program adds to our knowledge of the effect of SROs and offer several policy recommendations based on this work.
Previous research on school resource officers
Despite the North Carolina position statement, research shows that increased frequencies of interactions between students and SROs were not related to feelings of safety at school. Rather, student experiences at school were better predictors of feeling of safety. Males, students who have strong connectedness with schools, and students who had positive attitudes towards SROs reported feeling safer in schools. However, females, African-American students, and students who have experienced various forms of school violence, such as fights, arguments, bullying, or religious teasing, reported feeling less safe in schools, even though SROs were present.
There is evidence that SROs can build good relationships with students. For example, positive student outcomes were achieved when North Carolina SROs went above the call of duty to coach a middle school basketball team when no one else was available. Contrarily, there are also countless viral videos from around the country of SROs physically abusing youth for minor incidents, some of which have led to lawsuits and now permeate the minds of young adolescents.
Lessons from a new study
Based on my study of the North Carolina SRO matching grant program, described above, here are four lessons learned for initiating successful school safety policy and practices.
Lesson 1: Increasing investments in school resource officers does not lead to safer schools.
The position statement mentioned above asserts that SROs provide a deterrent to violence. Is this really true?
When comparing schools within districts that received additional funding for SROs to schools within districts that did not, I found no relationships between additional dollars received and reductions in the 16 disciplinary acts that must be reported to the state. Some of the 16 disciplinary outcomes include various forms of assault, homicide, bomb threats, possession and use of alcohol and drugs, possession of weapons, and more.
Approximately $23 million taxpayer dollars were spent to supplement local district funding for SROs in North Carolina between 2013 and 2017. During the 2013-2017 period, the annual amounts represented less than 1 percent of the state’s budget. Relatively speaking, the dollar amounts were not excessive. Yet, in 2018-2019, $12 million dollars of a new $35 million dollar grant were appropriated for school resource ... By Kenneth Alonzo Anderson
School resource officers (SROs), law enforcement personnel that are responsible for safety and crime prevention in schools, have been in place for more than six decades. In the wake of high-profile school shootings, SROs ... https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2018/10/31/new-report-on-essa-accountability-regulation-examines-agency-responsiveness-and-rule-durability/New report on ESSA Accountability regulation examines agency responsiveness and rule durabilityhttp://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/577680562/0/brookingsrss/topics/k12education/
Wed, 31 Oct 2018 14:06:01 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?p=545579

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By Diana Quintero

The rulemaking process has received a great deal of attention over the course of Trump’s presidency, in part because of the administration’s commitment to deregulation—and, in particular, its focus on repealing Obama-era rules.

Today, a new report from the Brown Center on Education Policy takes a deep dive into the process behind the Accountability and State Plans rule (the Accountability rule). This regulation was proposed by the Department of Education “to provide clarity and support” to state and local education agencies in implementing core provisions of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the law that replaced No Child Left Behind. The final rule was published in the final days of the Obama administration and subsequently repealed via the Congressional Review Act. This case study provides insight into how the public, agencies, and Congress shape the content and lifespan of final rules. In particular, it examines the relationship between agency responsiveness and rule durability.

In the report, Brown Center Fellow Elizabeth Mann Levesque explores the input that the department received from organizations via public comments and members of Congress via oversight hearings, as well as how the department revised the draft rule in response to this feedback. As a preview, the report finds that the department received a good deal of criticism on several high-profile aspects of the rule. In turn, the department was relatively responsive to this feedback. However, the changes the department made to the draft rule were ultimately not enough to satisfy Republican members of Congress, who repealed the final rule early in 2017.

Input from organizations

In the process of revising this rule, the Department of Education received feedback from a number of different sources. This report focuses specifically on feedback from organizations who submitted public comments. The research team identified 512 comments submitted by organizations, representing a small but important subset of the total 21,000 comments on the rule; this is because prior research suggests that agencies generally give more weight to sophisticated or technical comments. Compared to individuals, organizations are typically in a better position to provide this type of feedback given their resources and expertise.

timing of the rulemaking process? The analysis in this report points to the importance of understanding these and related questions about when and how the relationship between agency responsiveness and rule durability shapes the public policies articulated in final rules.

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https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/gs_20170116_devos-trump.jpg?w=270By Diana Quintero
The rulemaking process has received a great deal of attention over the course of Trump’s presidency, in part because of the administration’s commitment to deregulation—and, in particular, its focus on repealing Obama-era rules.
Today, a new report from the Brown Center on Education Policy takes a deep dive into the process behind the Accountability and State Plans rule (the Accountability rule). This regulation was proposed by the Department of Education “to provide clarity and support” to state and local education agencies in implementing core provisions of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the law that replaced No Child Left Behind. The final rule was published in the final days of the Obama administration and subsequently repealed via the Congressional Review Act. This case study provides insight into how the public, agencies, and Congress shape the content and lifespan of final rules. In particular, it examines the relationship between agency responsiveness and rule durability.
In the report, Brown Center Fellow Elizabeth Mann Levesque explores the input that the department received from organizations via public comments and members of Congress via oversight hearings, as well as how the department revised the draft rule in response to this feedback. As a preview, the report finds that the department received a good deal of criticism on several high-profile aspects of the rule. In turn, the department was relatively responsive to this feedback. However, the changes the department made to the draft rule were ultimately not enough to satisfy Republican members of Congress, who repealed the final rule early in 2017.
Input from organizations
In the process of revising this rule, the Department of Education received feedback from a number of different sources. This report focuses specifically on feedback from organizations who submitted public comments. The research team identified 512 comments submitted by organizations, representing a small but important subset of the total 21,000 comments on the rule; this is because prior research suggests that agencies generally give more weight to sophisticated or technical comments. Compared to individuals, organizations are typically in a better position to provide this type of feedback given their resources and expertise.
As shown by the figure above (taken from the report), the department received input from a wide variety of organizations. Slightly more than half of the comments come from advocacy organizations or local education agencies. Although only 13 percent of comments came from state governments, 82 percent of the states had a least one state official submitting comments. Other organizations including research centers, labor unions, and faith-based organizations comprised a smaller share of the comments.
To analyze the input that organizations provided, the research team coded each comment to identify each section(s) the commenter provided feedback on. For each section within a comment, researchers identified whether the commenter requested a major change, minor change, or expressed support. Major changes include requests to heavily revise the substantive requirements of a section, statements of opposition to the regulation section, and recommendations to delete a section entirely. Minor changes include requests for clarification, definitions, examples, guidance, or other small adjustments consistent with the substance of the proposed section. In sections coded as support, the commenter explicitly expressed support for a specific section of the regulation. While 44 percent of mentions were coded as major change and 34 percent as minor changes, only 22 percent were coded as support. (Please see the full report for additional details on the coding process.)
Based on these data, the report analyzes which sections of the regulation received the most requests for “major changes” and then ... By Diana Quintero
The rulemaking process has received a great deal of attention over the course of Trump’s presidency, in part because of the administration’s commitment to deregulation—and, in particular, its focus on ... https://www.brookings.edu/research/responsiveness-and-durability-an-analysis-of-the-accountability-and-state-plans-rule/Responsiveness and durability: An analysis of the Accountability and State Plans rulehttp://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/577672362/0/brookingsrss/topics/k12education/
Wed, 31 Oct 2018 12:00:13 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?post_type=research&p=545511

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By Elizabeth Mann

Introduction

Agencies in the federal bureaucracy shape public policy by issuing regulations, also known as rules. Final rules carry the weight of law (Garvey 2017).1 As a result, the rulemaking process affords agencies a great deal of influence over federal policy. The political appointees who head agencies are members of the president’s administration, tasked with steering policy in the direction of the administration’s goals (Lewis 2004). In this context, it should come as no surprise that agencies approach the rulemaking process strategically. For example, agencies attempt to pre-empt judicial review of the rule (Cheit 1990) and seek the optimal political conditions under which to finalize rules (Potter 2017). This research suggests that, through the rulemaking process, agencies work to minimize the chances that a final rule will subsequently be revised or repealed. In other words, it appears that agencies attempt to increase rule durability, where durability refers to the final rule remaining in effect without substantive revisions.

At the same time, agency behavior during the rulemaking process is constrained by procedural requirements. Many of these requirements were initially established in the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946 (APA), which was adopted to rein in the power of the federal bureaucracy (Kerwin and Furlong 2011). Additional requirements with respect to the rulemaking process have been added over time through executive orders, court decisions, and legislation (Kerwin and Furlong 2011; Garvey 2017; Carey 2013). Congressional committees may also hold oversight hearings during the rulemaking process in which they call in witnesses to discuss draft rules, including agency heads.

As a result of these procedural requirements and the prerogative of Congress to hold oversight hearings, agencies may receive input from a wide variety of stakeholders during the rulemaking process. This report focuses on the role of feedback received via congressional oversight hearings and the notice and comment process. Established by Section 553 of the APA, the notice and comment process requires agencies to solicit input from the public on draft rules (Kerwin and Furlong 2011).2 Agencies can decide whether or not to incorporate commenters’ feedback into the final rule, although they must respond to the issues that commenters raise and justify their decisions about the content of the final rule.

Agencies could thus choose not to incorporate into the final rule the feedback they receive from commenters and from members of Congress. Indeed, if feedback is at odds with the administration’s interpretation of the relevant law, the agency may have substantial motivation to defend the draft rule as written rather than to revise it. However, doing so may threaten the durability of the final rule. Public commenters may file a lawsuit disputing the agency’s decision to ignore their input, raising the risk of judicial review of the rule. In subsequent administrations, new political appointees may revise the rule to fix what they believe the agency got wrong the first time. Members of Congress who feel the agency did not adequately address their concerns raised during rulemaking could repeal the rule shortly after it is finalized using the Congressional Review Act (CRA). Even after the window to use the CRA closes, Congress could enact legislation that revises or overwrites a rule (Potter 2017).

In short, while attempting to create durable public policy through final rules, agencies must adhere to procedural requirements and anticipate the potential for oversight. How do agencies attempt to balance these priorities, how does the final rule reflect these efforts, and with what implications for rule durability? These questions speak to a broader inquiry about bureaucratic policymaking and oversight of this process: What is the nature of the relationship between agency responsiveness and rule durability?

The subsequent analysis offers an exploration of these important issues through an in-depth case study of the Accountability and State Plans rule, referred to hereafter as the Accountability rule. This rule offers an excellent opportunity to examine the relationship between agency responsiveness and rule durability. The Department of Education proposed this rule to implement core provisions of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), signed by President Obama in December 2015. The Accountability rule had the potential to be highly consequential for education policy, and the department’s proposed rule garnered a great deal of attention. The House and Senate committees on education held nine hearings in 2016 related to the department’s implementation of ESSA, some of which focused heavily on this rule, and the department received over 21,000 public comments on the draft Accountability rule.

This rulemaking process was marked by disagreements between Republican members of Congress and President Obama’s appointee, then-Secretary of Education John King. As the analysis below indicates, on several aspects of the draft rule, the department received substantial opposition from commenters and members of Congress alike. This context provides an opportunity to examine how the agency responded to this feedback.

Furthermore, the timing of this rulemaking process and the ultimate fate of the final rule makes it particularly useful for examining the relationship between responsiveness and the durability of final rules. The draft rule was published in spring 2016, and the public comment period and congressional hearings occurred before the 2016 presidential election. During this time, it was widely expected that the Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, would beat the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, in the 2016 presidential election. Of course, Trump won the election in a historic upset. Just weeks later, on Nov. 29, the final Accountability rule was published. Within months, the rule was repealed via the CRA, one of only a handful of rules ever to be repealed in this manner (Lipton and Lee 2017).

The rule’s repeal was far from inevitable, raising the question: Why was it repealed? Further, and of particular interest here, what might its repeal tell us about the relationship between agency responsiveness to concerns raised during the rulemaking process and rule durability? While use of the CRA is rare, this analysis is nonetheless relevant more broadly. The analysis begins with a close look at how the Department of Education responded to public comments, a process designed to increase transparency and accountability in the rulemaking process (Kerwin and Furlong 2011), followed by a discussion of how the department responded to opinions expressed by congressional Republicans, the majority party before and after the election. The report then examines how Congress reacted to the department’s final rule, offering insight into the relationship between responsiveness and rule durability. The relationships at the core of this analysis, between the agency and the public and the agency and Congress, remain relevant for many rules and the rulemaking process more generally.

In this context, this report explores the following questions with respect to the Accountability rule: What input did the department receive from organizations and members of Congress, how did the department respond, and what does this rulemaking process suggest about the relationship between agency responsiveness and rule durability?

The rulemaking process

This section offers a streamlined introduction to the rulemaking process, highlighting the main steps. Many other steps often occur along the way; see Carey (2013) for a detailed discussion.

Following passage of new legislation, agencies often write new rules to clarify how a specific component of the law should be implemented.3 Often, this process begins with an agency drafting a rule. Before being published for public comment, rules deemed “significant” must receive approval from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Office of Management and Budget (Carey 2013, p. 2). After receiving approval (if necessary), the agency publishes the draft rule, typically through a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) in the Federal Register (Carey 2013, p. 6).4 The public then has an opportunity to read the draft rule and submit written comments, typically for a period of 30 to 60 days (Carey 2013, p. 6). This is known as the comment period. As discussed above, members of Congress may also hold oversight hearings during the rulemaking process.

Notably, public comments and congressional oversight hearings are both mechanisms that provide for public accountability in the rulemaking process, wherein agencies (non-elected bodies of government) issue rules that profoundly affect public policy. By giving members of the public an opportunity to provide input on proposed rules and requiring agencies to respond to this feedback in writing, the comment period was designed to introduce more transparency and accountability into the rulemaking process (Kerwin and Furlong 2011). The comment process is one avenue through which agencies can receive information relevant to the proposed rule from experts, practitioners, and those whose work or lives would be affected by the rule (Kerwin and Furlong 2011, p. 169). For their part, congressional oversight hearings provide opportunities to hold agencies accountable for their actions (McCubbins and Schwartz 1984).

After the comment period closes, the agency drafts revisions to the rule. When revising draft regulations, the agency considers input received during the comment period, additional relevant evidence in the rulemaking record,5 the agency’s interpretation of the law, and the administration’s perspective on what policies would most effectively fulfill the law’s goals.6 Agencies are not required to include revisions recommended by commenters (Naughton et al. 2009, p. 260), although they must respond to each “significant” issue raised by commenters when they publish the final rule (Garvey 2017, p. 3). “Significant” rules require final approval from OIRA (Carey 2013, p. 2). Once approved by the required institutions, the final rule is published in the Federal Register.7

However, failure to adequately justify the rule may leave the final rule vulnerable to revision or repeal. Rules may be revised through legal challenges that result in judicial review of the rule (Carey 2013, p. 16). In the case of a legal challenge, courts typically apply the “arbitrary and capricious” standard of review (Garvey 2017, p. 14). Public comments may be used as part of the administrative record for judicial review; commenters and agencies alike are aware of this potential. Elliot (1992) argues that the primary purpose of the comment period is to establish a record for subsequent judicial review, while Cheit (1990) argues that agencies’ written responses to commenters are designed primarily to “ward off judicial review” (p. 217).

In addition, the Congressional Review Act allows for the repeal of a rule within 60 days after Congress receives the final rule, excluding congressional recess or adjournment (Carey 2013, p. 16). The proposal to repeal a rule must be introduced by a member of Congress, approved by both chambers of Congress, and enacted into law (Carey 2013, p. 16).8 Once repealed under the CRA, a “substantially similar” rule cannot be issued (Carey 2013, p. 16). The CRA is used rarely. Only one rule was repealed under this authority between the CRA’s passage in 1996 and 2017. In 2017, the Republican-controlled Congress used the CRA to repeal 14 rules finalized in the last days of the Obama administration (Lipton and Lee 2017).

Figure 1, from a report by the Congressional Research Service (Carey 2013), summarizes the typical rulemaking process.9

How did the Department of Education respond to input from commenters and Congress?

The notice and comment period closed on Aug. 1, 2016, and the last hearing in which members of Congress specifically addressed the Accountability rule was held on July 14. The department subsequently revised the draft rule and published the final rule on Nov. 29, 2016. This section begins with a brief discussion of the factors agencies frequently weigh when deciding how to revise a draft rule. Then, I discuss the extent to which the department’s revisions to the draft Accountability rule reflected input from organizations and members of Congress. Ultimately, this analysis suggests that the department was relatively responsive to critical feedback from commenters and members of Congress while also holding firm on several issues.

Agency considerations in revising draft regulations

As discussed above, agencies enjoy discretion over how to revise draft rules in light of public input. Several factors may influence whether an agency is more likely to make a revision in response to input from commenters. Research suggests that agencies are more likely to make revisions when there is a high degree of consensus among commenters (Golden 1998; Yackee 2006a).39 Additional research suggests that the volume of comments matters; in a sample of “everyday” rules, Yackee and McKay (2007) find that “the direction of change desired by the majority of commenters is generally realized in the final rule” (p. 345).40 However, agencies do not simply revise comments based on the will of the majority (Office of the Federal Register, p. 6), nor does a large volume of comments on one issue guarantee that the agency will adopt the requested change.41

In addition, agencies may try to minimize the chances of subsequent revision to or repeal of final rules through various strategies, including addressing concerns raised by members of Congress as well as circumventing oversight. For example, research suggests that when congressional attention to a rule increases, the influence of interest groups declines (Yackee 2006), suggesting that agencies take congressional input into account. A different set of tactics includes strategic behavior by agencies to avoid publishing rules during unfavorable political climates. For example, Potter (2017) finds that agencies “fast-track” or “slow-roll” the publication of final rules, anticipating political oversight from Congress, the White House, or the courts and releasing rules at favorable moments.

The political appointees who lead agencies seek to create durable public policy, and rulemaking is a valuable avenue through which agencies can shape policy for years to come. Thus, they must take calculated risks with respect to the rulemaking process: Where are they willing to compromise, and how can they satisfy members of Congress who may be in a position to revise or repeal a rule in the near future without undermining their policy goals? In short, we should expect agencies to pursue their policy goals while working to minimize the chance of possible threats to the rule in the future. As the case of the Accountability rule suggests, this balance can be difficult to achieve.

Responsiveness to commenter and congressional input

In the context of the Accountability rule, the congressional oversight hearings suggested a fundamental difference between congressional Republicans and Secretary King in their perspective on the department’s role in issuing regulations for ESSA. On several sections, pushback from commenters echoed this criticism. This section analyzes how the department responded to this input, beginning with an analysis of how revisions to the rule reflected commenter feedback.

To identify the changes the department made to the draft rule, I relied on the agency’s description of the “major substantive changes” in the final regulations. The department published this list of changes along with the final rule in the Federal Register on Nov. 29, 2016. This list is not an exhaustive accounting of changes made to the rule, and changes to the regulation that the department omitted from this list are not included in the analysis below. Nonetheless, this list of major substantive changes as identified by the department allows for meaningful assessment of the agency’s revisions to the rule.

Each revision in the department’s list of major substantive changes was coded using the same protocol applied to the comments, using the categories major change and minor change to identify the types of revisions made by the department. If the department deleted a section or substantially revised the section, it was coded as a major change. Revisions to the rule were coded as minor if they provided clarifications, definitions, examples, or minor additions or subtractions consistent with the originally proposed requirement.

It would be impractical, from a coding standpoint, to identify whether the department’s revisions align with the specific recommendations proposed by commenters in each of the 4,527 mentions in these data. However, I offer several analyses below to provide a window into the nature of the department’s responsiveness to commenter input.

First, how frequently did the department make major changes to a section when at least half of the mentions for that section recommended a major change? To examine this question, I consider the sections where at least half of the mentions request a major change, including only those sections that received at least 10 mentions. Forty-six sections meet this description. Of these, the department made a major change on 15 (about 33 percent) and a minor change on 10 (about 22 percent). While this analysis does not indicate the extent to which the department’s revisions aligned with commenter input, it indicates that the Department revised the rule in a number of cases when there was vocal opposition to the draft proposal.

For the remaining 21 sections in this category (about 46 percent), the department either made no revision or did not make a revision large enough to warrant inclusion in its summary of substantive changes. Notably, the department received at least some comments in support of 16 of these sections; on average, about 24 percent of mentions on these 16 sections supported the original provision. It may be that commenters who expressed support helped the department make a case to retain the original proposal in the face of critical feedback from other commenters.

Not surprisingly, the department was very likely to retain sections of the proposed rule that received substantial support from organization commenters. Specifically, there were 13 sections that received at least ten mentions where at least half of the mentions expressed support. Of these, the department only made a minor change to one section. The other 12 sections were not revised, or at least any revisions were not substantial enough for the department to include in its summary of substantive changes.

Next, I revisit the five sections in Table 1 that received the most “major change” mentions. While examining how the department responded to specific input from commenters across all sections is impractical, focusing on these five sections provides insight into how the department responded to commenter consensus with respect to these high-profile issues.

Table 3: Revisions to sections that received the most major change mentions

Section

Primary consensus

Revision in final rule

Alignment with consensus

200.18.b.4

Request for state flexibility to decide whether to use summative rating/state-designed options/additional options

Minor change: Clarification that states could provide additional information, like dashboards, while maintaining single summative rating requirement.

Final rule does not align with consensus. Although clarifies that states may provide “data dashboards” and other measures, final rule maintains the requirement to assign a single summative rating.

200.19.d.1

Timeline moved back one year

Major change: Timeline moved back one year.

Final rule aligns with consensus.

200.17.a.2

States should decide minimum n-size/rule should be silent on this issue

No change.

Final rule does not align with consensus; final rule maintains minimum n-size of 30.

200.15.b.2

Opposition to options for intervening in schools with participation rates below 95%

Major change: Removes requirements that state-designed option is “equally rigorous” to three options Department suggests and that state-designed option results in “a similar outcome as other possible outcomes.”

Final rule reflects consensus but does not align completely. Provides increased flexibility with respect to state-designed option while retaining requirement to intervene as well as list of three intervention options.

299.13.c.1

Opposition to burden of payment falling on LEA for foster child transportation; wants to emphasize mutual obligation for LEA and child welfare agencies to collaborate with respect to foster child transportation

Major change: Removes LEA burden of payment in the event of failure to reach an agreement. Emphasizes mutual obligation to collaborate.

Final rule aligns with consensus.

The department’s response across these five sections varies. With respect to sections 299.13.c.1 and 200.19.d.1, the department’s revision aligns with the primary consensus expressed by commenters. Notably, Democrats as well as Republicans expressed concerned over these provisions during congressional hearings, suggesting that perhaps the department was particularly responsive to commenter consensus that was also echoed in bipartisan critiques. With respect to section 200.15.b.2, the department revised the rule to grant states more flexibility in deciding how to incorporate standardized test participation rates into their accountability systems. This revision addressed a dimension of the core complaint expressed in the primary consensus, but the department did not remove the list of options for how states could incorporate the participation rate into accountability systems, a change the consensus supported. While this revision reflected commenter consensus and responsiveness to critiques of overreach, in comparison to sections 299.13.c.1 and 200.19.d.1, it did not align as closely with the requested change. Overall, however, the department’s revisions to these three sections indicate responsiveness to widely shared concerns.42

In contrast, the department was less responsive with respect to sections 200.17.a.2 and 200.18.b.4. With respect to section 200.17.a.2, the primary consensus favored allowing states to decide the minimum number of students required for sub-group reporting. However, the department maintained the minimum “n-size” of 30. The department also retained the summative rating requirement in section 200.18.b.4. In addition to commenter consensus requesting additional flexibility on this issue, recall that Sen. Alexander strongly objected to this requirement. While the department did revise this section to clarify that the summative rating requirement did not prohibit states from using data dashboards, the department retained the requirement to assign schools a single rating.

In retaining this controversial section, the department contravened the consensus among commenters and congressional Republicans. This commitment to the original proposal suggests that the department’s decisions on whether and how to revise the rule were informed by its interpretation of the law and, specifically, the department’s role in implementing ESSA and maintaining federal oversight. When this interpretation did not align with commenter consensus, as measured here, or the perspective of congressional Republicans, the department did not necessarily revise the rule in compliance.

In addition, although the majority of commenters who discussed section 200.18.b.4 expressed opposition to the summative rating, the department did hear from organizations who supported the requirement. Of the 250 mentions on this section, 43 (about 17 percent) expressed support for the summative rating requirement. For example, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a national coalition of civil rights organizations, submitted a comment co-signed by an additional 31 organizations that expressed unequivocal support for the summative rating requirement. Support from commenters endorsing the summative rating requirement may have been an important element of the department’s decision to retain this section.

With respect to the broader political environment, between the time the comment period closed on Aug. 1 and Trump’s election on Nov. 8, the department had good reason to believe that maintaining its position on controversial provisions of the regulation would not threaten the durability of the final rule. Hillary Clinton was widely expected to win the presidency, and with a Democrat in the White House, the rule would almost certainly be safe from repeal via the CRA and personnel changes at the department.

With Trump’s unexpected victory, of course, the political environment changed overnight, as Republicans gained control of the House, Senate, and presidency. However, even in this environment, the department may have concluded that its willingness to compromise on several high-profile issues would sufficiently satisfy detractors, even as the department retained several provisions consistent with its interpretation of ESSA and the department’s federal oversight role but inconsistent with consensus among organizations who submitted public comments and congressional Republicans.

Would the rule have escaped repeal via the CRA if the department had adopted more changes aligned with organizations’ input and, perhaps more importantly, congressional Republicans’ preferences? We will never know the answer, of course. Making additional concessions to congressional Republicans (and commenters who agreed with them) may have insulated the law from repeal, but doing so may have led to a Pyhrric victory from the department’s perspective: creating a rule that, while durable, omitted central elements of federal oversight that the department viewed as indispensable to implementation of the law.

Responsiveness and Rule Durability: Lessons from the Accountability rule

The final Accountability and State Plans rule was published on Nov. 29, 2016.43 In the normal course of events, the rule would have governed how states implemented central components of the Every Student Succeeds Act. However, as discussed above, this rule became one of a handful of rules to be repealed using the Congressional Review Act. Indeed, the day the final rule was published, Education Week reported that “with President-elect Donald Trump set to take office in January, the regulations face an uncertain future.”44

Ultimately, the House voted to repeal the regulation on Feb. 7, 2017, the Senate followed suit on March 9, and President Trump signed the repeal on Marcy 27. Notably, some advocates on the right and left alike urged Congress to retain the rule, expressing concern that by repealing it under the CRA, which would preclude the department from issuing a similar regulation, Congress would eliminate an opportunity to clarify the relevant ESSA requirements for state and local education agencies.45 This argument did not sway Republican members of Congress; only one Republican representative and one senator voted against repeal. Sen. Alexander introduced the legislation for repeal in the Senate, reiterating his concerns expressed during oversight hearings: “Here is the problem with this rule that was put out by the U.S. Department of Education: the rule specifically does things or requires states to do things that Congress said in our law fixing No Child Left Behind that the department can’t do.”46

This analysis of the Accountability rule offers several insights into the relationship between agency responsiveness and durability. To begin, the department was responsive to feedback it received from organizations via public comments. In the case of several high-profile sections where the department received substantial criticism from a variety of different organizations, the department revised the rule consistent with commenter consensus. This analysis suggests that public comments can play an important role in providing agencies with relevant information and persuading them to modify proposed rules. Thus, it appears that agency responsiveness is at least to some degree a function of procedural requirements initially established in the APA.

However, the department also at times held firm even in light of substantial critical feedback from organization commenters. This case suggests that commenter consensus does not always succeed in convincing an agency to revise a draft rule, even if this consensus is supported by a variety of organizations representing different constituencies. When agencies disagree with commenters (and members of Congress) about how to interpret the relevant federal law, agencies may be less willing to revise the regulation to accommodate commenter consensus. This case thus underscores agencies’ willingness and ability to exercise discretion during the rulemaking process.

At the same time, the repeal of the Accountability rule reflects the power of congressional oversight of the bureaucracy. Republican members of Congress—particularly Sen. Alexander, a leader on education policy—repeatedly expressed their objections to the proposed rule. The department, in turn, did indeed make several major revisions. However, the department remained committed to its interpretation of ESSA. Sen. Alexander saw this approach as federal overreach and repetition of NCLB-era mistakes, and ultimately, the majority party in Congress prevailed over the department.

Conclusion

This report began with the observation that agencies, and particularly the political appointees that run them, are motivated to influence public policy. Rule durability is thus an important consideration when agencies decide how to respond to input received from public comments and members of Congress during the rulemaking process. While the CRA is not always a relevant political tool, given that it can only be used to repeal a rule within 60 days of Congress receiving the final rule (Carey 2013), its use in this case underscores the significance of the political environment for rule durability. To create a durable Accountability rule, the Department of Education may have had to eliminate what it considered key provisions of the regulation central to the department’s oversight role under ESSA. The broader implication is that credible threats to final rules, either via judicial review or congressional action, may force agencies to choose between substantive revisions to the final rule or the risk of subsequent repeal.

Ultimately, this analysis of the Accountability rule suggests that we might reasonably expect agencies to revise rules based on the input that agencies receive via comments from organizations and congressional testimony (among other types of input), an agency’s interpretation of the federal law, and the agency’s beliefs about whether making revisions (or refusing to do so) will extend (or shorten) the rule’s lifespan. The precise manner in which agencies balance these considerations, and the conditions under which they prioritize one over another, are important questions for future study. Under what conditions is an agency willing to make compromises, such as making revisions to the draft rule, to ensure that the final rule faces minimal opposition? Are agencies more likely to revise the draft rule when bipartisan critiques arise? Faced with credible threats to rule durability from Congress, how do agencies decide whether to revise the rule or pursue an alternative strategy such as manipulating the timing of the rulemaking process (Potter 2017)? The analysis here points to the importance of understanding these and related questions about when and how the relationship between agency responsiveness and rule durability shapes the public policies articulated in final rules.

Acknowledgements

This project would not have been possible without Diana Quintero, who patiently devoted many hours to data coding and analysis and who provided wise counsel every step of the way. I am grateful to Elizabeth Martin for her tireless work coding these comments, to Nora Gordon, Rachel Potter, Molly Reynolds, Jennifer Selin, and Phil Wallach for their insightful feedback, and to Anne Hyslop for sharing her expertise. Thank you to Hana Dai, Caitlin Dermody, Yuhe Gu, Bethany Kirkpatrick, James McIntrye, Sarah Novicoff, Max Rombado, Kim Truong, and Helen Zhang for their excellent research assistance.

Thank you to the Spencer Foundation for their generous support of this research.

The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit organization devoted to independent research and policy solutions. Its mission is to conduct high-quality, independent research and, based on that research, to provide innovative, practical recommendations for policymakers and the public. The conclusions and recommendations of any Brookings publication are solely those of its author(s), and do not reflect the views of the Institution, its management, or its other scholars.

Brookings recognizes that the value it provides is in its absolute commitment to quality, independence, and impact. Activities supported by its donors reflect this commitment.

Appendix

Coding protocol: Identifying organizations among the comments

To identify organizations among the roughly 21,000 comments, we excluded all comments that did not include a self-reported organization name in the “Organization Name” field of the comment form or where the submitter self-identified as one of the following in the “Category” field on the comment form: other, individual, parent/relative, principal, public or private school, or teacher. We also did not include comments that appeared to be part of mass comment campaigns.

This sorting process resulted in about 1,000 comments that were potentially submitted by organizations. The self-reported information in the “Organization Name” and “Category” fields was often unreliable. As a result, the research team reviewed each comment and assessed whether the comment was submitted by an organization. To qualify as being submitted by an organization, the comment must have been submitted on letterhead that clearly indicated the comment represents the viewpoint of an organization rather than an individual, submitted by a representative clearly acting on behalf of an organization, or submitted by someone in a leadership role at the organization, such as a director or CEO. Comments did not qualify as an organization if they were submitted by staff in a non-leadership position (such as someone in charge of a particular office) unless the comment clearly represented the organization, not the viewpoint of an individual employee. To verify whether a comment represented an organization, we examined the comment and the self-reported information of the submitter, and when necessary, we conducted internet searches of the submitter and/or the organization.

To identify the state of a commenter, we relied on the state as provided by the commenter in the “state or province” field of the comment form. If the commenter did not provide this information, we determined the state from the comment text and, if necessary, an internet search of the organization that submitted the comment.

We then categorized each comment into one of the following organization types:

Business

Faith-based organization

Federal government (includes members of Congress)

Advocacy organization

Local education agency (school districts, superintendents, assistant superintendents, local school boards, and local school board members)

Philanthropy

Professional association

Research center

State government (includes state education agencies, governors, legislators, and other state government organizations)

Tribal government or representative

Labor union

Other

As discussed in the text, if a comment was submitted by multiple organizations, we coded the organization type based on the organization identified in the “Organization Name” category or the organization type listed in “Category.” If this information was not provided, we classified the organization type based on the signatories.

With respect to local education agencies (LEAs), we included comments submitted by assistant superintendents as well as superintendents, as they represent local education agencies. However, we did not include comments submitted by staff members within LEAs or representatives of individual schools, including principals and school-level administrators. In the context of state education agencies, we used a similar logic.

This coding strategy was developed to systematically and objectively include comments submitted by organizations, and to cast a wide net to minimize the chances of omitting comments that were submitted by organizations. However, given the inconsistency in how commenters self-identified, it is almost certainly the case that some comments that meet our criteria as an organization were unintentionally excluded. Despite these omissions, we are confident that this systematic approach produced a reliable dataset of the comments submitted by organizations with respect to this rule.

Coding sections: Major change, minor change, support

Because of personnel changes over the course of this project, the same team of coders did not code all of the comments. First, two independent coders coded comments in which the commenter filled in the field “Organization Name” on the comment form. The coders helped develop the coding protocol and received training on how to apply the coding protocol. They met regularly with the principal investigator to ensure consistency in coding. The overlap between coders was 25 percent of the original 570 comments where submitters wrote in an organization name, and the agreement rates between coders indicate that coders applied these categories consistently. The agreement rate between the two coders was 76 percent (kappa score = 0.64). This agreement rate includes instances of disagreement when both coders identified a “mention” but entered different codes. It also includes instances of disagreement when only one of the two coders identified a “mention” for coding (thus one coder had no code and one coder had support/major changes/minor changes).

Thus, this measure of interrater agreement is conservative, as it includes disagreements that resulted when one coder identified the comment as mentioning a particular section of the regulation and another did not. These disagreements do not reflect differences in application of the major, minor, or support labels, but rather, the difficulty in identifying whether a commenter was mentioning a specific section of the regulation. To better understand the interrater agreement rate with respect to applying the major, minor, and support codes, I calculate a kappa score that omits instances where the disagreement resulted because one coder identified a “mention” and another did not. Including only sections where both coders identified a “mention” and assigned a code, the agreement rate was 86 percent (kappa score = 0.77).

The agreement rate between coders is very similar in the sample that only includes the 327 comments we identified as organizations from the original 570 comments where submitters self-identified as organizations in the “Organization Name” field (75 percent with a kappa score = 0.62 for all mentions; 85 percent with a kappa score = 0.75 for sections where both coders identified a mention).

Although these rates of agreement were sufficiently high, the principal investigator and one of the original coders reviewed each mention to improve upon the consistency of the coding. After the initial round of coding, one of the original coders and the principal investigator were randomly assigned sections (i.e. Section 200.18.b.4) and reviewed each of the relevant mentions to ensure that the section numbers were identified accurately and that the support/major/minor categories were applied consistently.

After the initial round of coding, one of the original coders left the organization. Subsequently, it became clear that a number of comments from organizations had a blank “Organization Name” but indicated they represented an organization in the “Category” field. We thus added to the dataset any comments where the commenter identified an organization type within the “Category” field using the criteria for identifying an organization described above. The principal investigator coded these comments using the same coding criteria as discussed above, consulting one of the original coders when a comment was unclear.

Lewis, David. Presidents and the Politics of Agency Design: Political Insulation in the United States Government Bureaucracy, 1946-1997. Stanford University Press, 2004.

Lipton, Eric, and Jasmine C. Lee. “Which Obama-Era Rules Are Being Reversed in the Trump Era.” New York Times. Last modified May 18, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/01/us/politics/trump-obama-regulations-reversed.html.

Looney, Adam. “How to Effectively Comment on Regulations.” Center on Regulation and Markets at the Brookings Institution, August 2018.

“Number of Public Elementary and Secondary Education Agencies, by Type of Agency and State or Jurisdiction: 2014-15 and 2015-16.” Chart. In National Center for Education Statistics.

Obama, Barack. “Remarks by the President at Every Student Succeeds Act Signing Ceremony.” The Obama White House Archives. Last modified December 10, 2015. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/12/10/remarks-president-every-student-succeeds-act-signing-ceremony.

U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Committee on Education and the Workforce. Next Steps for K-12 Education: Implementing the Promise to Restore State and Local Control. 114 th Cong., 2nd sess., February 10, 2016.

U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Committee on Education and the Workforce. Next Steps for K-12 Education: Upholding the Letter and Intent of the Every Student Succeeds Act. 114th Cong., 2nd sess., February 25, 2016.

Yackee, Susan Webb. “Sweet-talking the Fourth Branch: The Influence of Interest Group Comments on Federal Agency Rulemaking.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 16, no. 1 (January 2006): 103-24.

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https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/topicimg_uspoliticsandgovernment1.jpg?w=281By Elizabeth Mann
Introduction
Agencies in the federal bureaucracy shape public policy by issuing regulations, also known as rules. Final rules carry the weight of law (Garvey 2017).1 As a result, the rulemaking process affords agencies a great deal of influence over federal policy. The political appointees who head agencies are members of the president’s administration, tasked with steering policy in the direction of the administration’s goals (Lewis 2004). In this context, it should come as no surprise that agencies approach the rulemaking process strategically. For example, agencies attempt to pre-empt judicial review of the rule (Cheit 1990) and seek the optimal political conditions under which to finalize rules (Potter 2017). This research suggests that, through the rulemaking process, agencies work to minimize the chances that a final rule will subsequently be revised or repealed. In other words, it appears that agencies attempt to increase rule durability, where durability refers to the final rule remaining in effect without substantive revisions.
At the same time, agency behavior during the rulemaking process is constrained by procedural requirements. Many of these requirements were initially established in the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946 (APA), which was adopted to rein in the power of the federal bureaucracy (Kerwin and Furlong 2011). Additional requirements with respect to the rulemaking process have been added over time through executive orders, court decisions, and legislation (Kerwin and Furlong 2011; Garvey 2017; Carey 2013). Congressional committees may also hold oversight hearings during the rulemaking process in which they call in witnesses to discuss draft rules, including agency heads.
As a result of these procedural requirements and the prerogative of Congress to hold oversight hearings, agencies may receive input from a wide variety of stakeholders during the rulemaking process. This report focuses on the role of feedback received via congressional oversight hearings and the notice and comment process. Established by Section 553 of the APA, the notice and comment process requires agencies to solicit input from the public on draft rules (Kerwin and Furlong 2011).2 Agencies can decide whether or not to incorporate commenters’ feedback into the final rule, although they must respond to the issues that commenters raise and justify their decisions about the content of the final rule.
Agencies could thus choose not to incorporate into the final rule the feedback they receive from commenters and from members of Congress. Indeed, if feedback is at odds with the administration’s interpretation of the relevant law, the agency may have substantial motivation to defend the draft rule as written rather than to revise it. However, doing so may threaten the durability of the final rule. Public commenters may file a lawsuit disputing the agency’s decision to ignore their input, raising the risk of judicial review of the rule. In subsequent administrations, new political appointees may revise the rule to fix what they believe the agency got wrong the first time. Members of Congress who feel the agency did not adequately address their concerns raised during rulemaking could repeal the rule shortly after it is finalized using the Congressional Review Act (CRA). Even after the window to use the CRA closes, Congress could enact legislation that revises or overwrites a rule (Potter 2017).
In short, while attempting to create durable public policy through final rules, agencies must adhere to procedural requirements and anticipate the potential for oversight. How do agencies attempt to balance these priorities, how does the final rule reflect these efforts, and with what implications for rule durability? These questions speak to a broader inquiry about bureaucratic policymaking and oversight of this process: What is the nature of the relationship between agency ... By Elizabeth Mann
Introduction
Agencies in the federal bureaucracy shape public policy by issuing regulations, also known as rules. Final rules carry the weight of law (Garvey 2017).1 As a result, the rulemaking process affords agencies a great ... https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2018/10/30/climate-confusion-content-and-strategies-not-controversy-are-the-biggest-challenges-for-science-teachers/Climate confusion: Content and strategies, not controversy, are the biggest challenges for science teachershttp://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/577503982/0/brookingsrss/topics/k12education/
Tue, 30 Oct 2018 17:45:14 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?p=545434

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By David Devraj Kumar, Michael Hansen

Earlier this month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a new report describing the new risks the world will likely face by 2040 if governments fail to make significant progress on climate change. Yet, the likelihood of dramatically cutting greenhouse emissions in the U.S. is stymied by political divides among both politicians and the public about the urgency of the problem.

Helping science teachers effectively teach students about climate change is one of the most important topics in science education. Science teachers, however, often report feeling ill prepared in both content and pedagogical knowledge to teach environmental science and related topics, including climate change. Thus, many classrooms are led by teachers who do not feel equipped to provide meaningful learning experience in the topic—a situation that has been dubbed “climate confusion.”

This confusion is admittedly a bit ironic: Environmental topics inherently have real-world applications, which should provide an advantage in comparison to more abstract science fields. Paired with the right teaching toolkit, simple observation of the world outside the classroom is all that is needed to offer information-rich contexts for teaching children the underlying scientific concepts behind climate change, improving critical thinking skills, practicing informed decisionmaking, and developing environmental literacy. Climate change is a topic specifically named in the Next Generation Science Standards (2-13) (e.g., “ESS3D: Global Climate Change”); however, attempts to often sensationalize environmental topics like climate change by non-scientists (who often have their own ideology) tend to hamper its successful implementation in classrooms. When this happens, the opportunity for students to learn real-world science content is lost, along with any associated benefit from cognitive or affective gains.

In addition, assuming that lessons taught by a teacher are driven by the curriculum, most of the existing curricula are, by implication, inadequate to help teachers separate the signal from the noise and properly address environmental topics for their students. The newfound urgency of global warming should not be an excuse, as we’ve known about inadequate teaching materials for years. Back in 2000, Jeffrey Salmon concluded, “Teachers are the key to successful environmental education, but materials often fail to give them the support they need” (p. 8) based on a nationwide analysis of environmental science curricula. His recommendations for improvement included that curriculum should focus more on content and knowledge building in environmental sciences, rather than simply developing awareness of the topic as is commonly done.

In this context, how to help teachers develop the skills to effectively teach climate change remains a pressing, outstanding question. Should we use pre-service teacher education to affect the skills of those entering the workforce or in-service teacher workshops in an attempt to help everyone already in the classroom?

The evidence to date suggests both options offer promise and would better serve students compared to the quality of instruction they now receive. In a case study of in-service teachers who participated in a climate change professional development workshop, 70 percent reported that they “solidified their understanding on the connection between carbon cycling and climate change as well as the connection between ethanol burning and climate change” (p. 245), when asked to reflect on the workshop. In another study, novice science teachers who participated in a similar climate change workshop reported that their content knowledge improved in the areas of temperature, ice melt, density, thermal expansion, changing ocean currents, and other natural processes as a result of the workshop.

Another training, implemented among preservice teachers in an undergraduate K-9 science education methods course using a water-quality computer simulation, showed gains in participants’ understanding of science concepts, such as macroinvertebrates, composition of air, dissolved oxygen, and classes of organisms that form a river ecosystem. In addition, the training enabled the participants to transfer knowledge from the simulation into developing science lesson plans. Either way, through pre-service education or in-service training, teachers need science content knowledge to properly address environmental issues in the classroom. One should also bear in mind that improvement in teacher understanding may not translate to improved student outcomes unless the classroom environment is conducive to student-centered learning experiences.

The importance of science content knowledge is key and, ideally, science teachers should be trained first to address environmental topics such as climate change without compromising the scientific base. Without an adequate foundation in science content, it may not be that easy for a teacher to understand the complexities of climate change and to teach this important topic with confidence.

When teachers are not adequately equipped to deal with important science topics such as climate change, they may tend to treat critical topics superficially, with negative consequences for students. It should be pointed out that, among science teachers, only 42 percent at the middle school and 39 percent at the high school level consider themselves “very well prepared to teach” climate and weather (p. 26). Instead of setting up teachers for failure, let’s equip them to be successful in teaching content-rich environmental education topics to school children.

But let’s not overlook pedagogical strategies for teaching science. Teachers not only need content knowledge, but should also use instructional techniques that allow for engaging student-centered, hands-on learning rather than rote memorization. These strategies appear to have the best chance of improving students’ conceptual understanding, as well as developing scientific process skills like critical thinking and problem solving (e.g., problem-based learning), which are increasingly needed in a society and workforce that are dominated by science and technology. Unfortunately, the 2012 National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education reported that only 9 percent of elementary, 6 percent of middle and 3 percent of high school classes “engage the class in project-based learning activities [in] all or almost all lessons” (p. 75). Likewise, 16 percent of elementary, 10 percent of middle, and 8 percent of high school classes “do hands-on/laboratory activities [in] all or almost all lessons” (p. 75).

In light of the politically divisive nature of some science topics like climate change, many suspect that teachers find themselves in a bind between parent pressures and curriculum demands. Yet, contrary to popular belief, only 3 percent of science program representatives at elementary schools, 6 percent at middle schools and 2 percent at high schools viewed “community resistance to the teaching of ‘controversial’ issues in science” (e.g., climate change) a “serious problem for science instruction” (p. 118). Thus, overcoming climate confusion may be feasible by focusing on teachers and curriculum without requiring the Sisyphean task of educating parents about environmental science.

Qualified teachers who are equipped to make informed scientific decisions will be able to decide whether global warming is natural or man-made. And without any doubt, through engaging pedagogies, their students will be able to do the same, too! It’s time to take bold steps to reform science education curriculum in order to help teachers lead lessons on important environmental science topics, such as climate change—without compromising content or instruction. Like climate change itself, improving the current state of science education is urgent and critically necessary to help teachers overcome climate confusion, and to help lead the next generation forward as they learn to grapple with its consequences.

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By David Devraj Kumar, Michael Hansen
Earlier this month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a new report describing the new risks the world will likely face by 2040 if governments fail to make significant progress on climate change. Yet, the likelihood of dramatically cutting greenhouse emissions in the U.S. is stymied by political divides among both politicians and the public about the urgency of the problem.
Helping science teachers effectively teach students about climate change is one of the most important topics in science education. Science teachers, however, often report feeling ill prepared in both content and pedagogical knowledge to teach environmental science and related topics, including climate change. Thus, many classrooms are led by teachers who do not feel equipped to provide meaningful learning experience in the topic—a situation that has been dubbed “climate confusion.”
This confusion is admittedly a bit ironic: Environmental topics inherently have real-world applications, which should provide an advantage in comparison to more abstract science fields. Paired with the right teaching toolkit, simple observation of the world outside the classroom is all that is needed to offer information-rich contexts for teaching children the underlying scientific concepts behind climate change, improving critical thinking skills, practicing informed decisionmaking, and developing environmental literacy. Climate change is a topic specifically named in the Next Generation Science Standards (2-13) (e.g., “ESS3D: Global Climate Change”); however, attempts to often sensationalize environmental topics like climate change by non-scientists (who often have their own ideology) tend to hamper its successful implementation in classrooms. When this happens, the opportunity for students to learn real-world science content is lost, along with any associated benefit from cognitive or affective gains.
Most teachers are now confused on how to address climate change topics within the classroom. This confusion was even evident in teachers’ beliefs about whether global warming is natural or man-made. The deficiency is partly due to the lack of content knowledge: Allison Anderson pointed out content knowledge as one of the barriers to quality teaching about climate change.
In addition, assuming that lessons taught by a teacher are driven by the curriculum, most of the existing curricula are, by implication, inadequate to help teachers separate the signal from the noise and properly address environmental topics for their students. The newfound urgency of global warming should not be an excuse, as we’ve known about inadequate teaching materials for years. Back in 2000, Jeffrey Salmon concluded, “Teachers are the key to successful environmental education, but materials often fail to give them the support they need” (p. 8) based on a nationwide analysis of environmental science curricula. His recommendations for improvement included that curriculum should focus more on content and knowledge building in environmental sciences, rather than simply developing awareness of the topic as is commonly done.
In this context, how to help teachers develop the skills to effectively teach climate change remains a pressing, outstanding question. Should we use pre-service teacher education to affect the skills of those entering the workforce or in-service teacher workshops in an attempt to help everyone already in the classroom?
The evidence to date suggests both options offer promise and would better serve students compared to the quality of instruction they now receive. In a case study of in-service teachers who participated in a climate change professional development workshop, 70 percent reported that they “solidified their understanding on the connection between carbon cycling and climate change as well as the connection between ethanol burning and climate ... By David Devraj Kumar, Michael Hansen
Earlier this month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a new report describing the new risks the world will likely face by 2040 if governments fail to make significant progress on climate ... https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-evaluation-roadmap-for-optimizing-pre-k-programs/The evaluation roadmap for optimizing pre-K programshttp://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/574251124/0/brookingsrss/topics/k12education/
Thu, 11 Oct 2018 17:39:31 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?post_type=research&p=536590

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By Anna D. Johnson, Deborah A. Phillips, Owen Schochet

In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that one of the best ways to build a productive and prosperous society is to start early – that is, before children enter kindergarten – in building children’s foundation for learning, health, and positive behavior. From the U.S. Chambers of Commerce to the National Academy of Sciences, those planning our country’s workforce insist we will need more people, with more diverse skills, to meet the challenges of the future. In response, educators have focused on supporting learning earlier, recognizing that early learning establishes the foundation upon which all future skill development is constructed. Identifying and replicating the most important features of successful pre-K programs in order to optimize this potential is now a national imperative.

A wealth of evidence supports continued efforts to improve and scale up pre-kindergarten (pre-K) programs. This evidence is summarized in a companion report to this evaluation roadmap: “Puzzling It Out: The Current State of Scientific Knowledge on Pre-Kindergarten Effects”. Designing programs in a way that ensures meaningful, short- and long-term effects requires evaluation of programs over time. This goal was the focus of a series of meetings and discussions among a high-level group of practitioners and researchers with responsibility for and experience with designing, implementing and evaluating pre-k programs across the country. This report reflects the best thinking of this practitioner-research engagement effort.

As you prepare to evaluate a pre-K program, we invite you to draw upon this practice- and research-informed expertise to design early education settings that better support early learning and development. Your careful attention to evaluation will help early education systems from across the country identify the factors that distinguish effective programs from less effective ones and take constructive action to better meet our country’s educational and workforce goals.

We view this work as the equivalent of building a national highway. We must survey and compare local conditions, adapt designs to suit, map and share progress, and identify and resolve im-pediments so our country can get where it needs to go. This document is a guide – or roadmap – for those who are building this educational highway system; we hope it will ensure that we optimize our resources and learn from innovations along the way.

There is much good work to build upon. State-funded pre-K programs have been the focus of nearly two decades of evaluation research. This research has produced a large body of evidence on the immediate impacts of pre-K programs on children’s school achievement and pointed to some good bets about the inputs that produce these impacts.

But there is more you can do to improve existing programs and ensure that the next generation of programs builds upon this evidence. A central finding from the initial phase of pre-K evaluations is that state and local conditions vary widely, which makes it difficult to draw firm conclusions about the effectiveness of pre-K programs across locations. As the “Puzzling it Out” authors concluded, “We lack the kind of specific, reliable, consistent evidence we need to move from early models to refinements and redesigns”. We don’t have the evaluation evidence we need to apply lessons learned from first- to second-generation pre-K programs or from one district or state pre-K program to another. In short, we don’t have the information we need to inform the continuous improvement efforts called for in “Puzzling it Out” that are so essential to fulfilling the promise of pre-k for our nation’s children. It is this challenge that we take on as we attempt to build the next phase of evaluation science on firm ground so that states and school districts can continue to expand and improve their pre-K systems for the benefit of our society.

This roadmap offers direction to states and school districts at varying stages of designing, developing, implementing, and overseeing pre-K programs. It is organized around seven key questions, briefly summarized in this introduction and discussed in more detail in the full re-port. These questions are best addressed as an integrated series of considerations when designing and launching an evaluation so that it produces the most useful information for you and your colleagues across the country. We summarize these key questions, below.

The departure point for any evaluation is clarity in the question(s) you want the evaluation to answer. The questions you want to answer will shape the specific information you seek and other decisions you make. Consider these three broad questions: (a) Are we doing what we planned to do (implementation studies)? (b) Are we doing it well (quality monitoring)? (c) Are we doing it well enough to achieve desired impacts (impact evaluations)? (d) What elements of program design account for the impacts (design research)? There is a logical sequence to these questions: if a program has not yet been implemented fully and with fidelity, there is little value in assessing its quality. And if a program has not yet reached an acceptable level of quality, there is little value in assessing its impacts. Once impacts are documented, replicating or strengthening them requires identifying the active ingredients or “effectiveness factors” that produced them. To wit: transportation officials don’t road-test a highway before it has been graded and paved, and work is constantly underway to improve the materials and methods for building better highways. Similarly, don’t test the impacts of a pre-K program before it has been fully implemented and, when evaluating impacts, be sure to include assessments of program design features that might explain the impacts. The data you collect while assessing program implementation, quality, and impacts will help you interpret and improve the program’s capacity to contribute to children’s learning in both the short- and longer-term.

Specificity is key to all that comes after. One of the biggest challenges we face in securing comparable data from pre-K evaluations conducted across districts and states is the fact that there is no single approach to providing pre-K education. Different states have adopted different models and implemented different systems, and districts within states often adapt models and strategies to meet local needs. Many target pre-K systems to children at risk of poor school performance (usually those in poverty), while others offer pre-K to all 4-year-olds and even 3-year-olds, regardless of their socioeconomic status. Programs also differ by length and location. Some provide full-day programs, others provide half-day programs, and still others provide both. Virtually all states provide pre-K in school-based classrooms, but most also provide pro-grams in Head Start and/or community-based child care settings-often with differing teacher qualifications and reimbursement rates. Funding for pre-K programs is often braided into federal and state child care subsidies as well as funding for other programs, such as those affiliated with Head Start, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and the Every Student Succeeds Act.

Importantly, given the wide variation in pre-K programs across and within states, the first step in designing an evaluation must be to map the landscape of pre-K education in your area. Be sure to answer the following questions: How is it funded? Where is it provided? Which children and families participate in pre-K, for how much time during the school day and year, and with what attendance rates?

Moreover, because of this variation in how the provision of pre-K education is approached in different locales, as well as in program design features such as teacher qualifications and support, and reliance on specific curricula or instructional strategies, approaching pre-K as a monolithic program to be evaluated by a single set of broad questions (e.g., Is it well implemented? Did it work?) will not yield particularly actionable data. The more informative task is to understand the conditions under which pre-K is well implemented, provides quality services, and produces impacts. Thus, understanding the key elements of variation in your pre-K program, as well as “best bet” candidates for design features that may explain your findings, is foundational to designing useful evaluations. Research-practice partnerships can be especially valuable in this context.

Different, though overlapping, research strategies are needed for different evaluation questions, namely those addressing (a) implementation, (b) quality monitoring, (c) impacts, and (d) program design. For questions about implementation and quality, the core design challenges relate to representation and validity. The representation challenge is to obtain data from a sufficiently representative and large sample of settings (and classrooms within settings), while the validity challenge is to ensure the use of assessment tools that capture variation in the key constructs of interest. For questions about impacts and the design elements that produce them, the core challenges relate to causality and counterfactual evidence (i.e., effects that would have arisen anyway in the absence of the pre-K program or model under review). The causality challenge is to provide the most compelling evidence that impacts can be ascribed to the pre-K program or model under study rather than to other factors. The counterfactual challenge is to be as precise as possible in identifying a non-pre-K (or “different” pre-K) comparison group from which sufficient information can be gathered about children’s non-pre-K or other-pre-K experiences. Select a design that best meets these challenges and, at the same time, be sure to collect data that are not subject to bias. Importantly, different participant enrollment strategies (e.g., by lottery, with an age or income cut-off) yield different possibilities for enhancing design strength. Efforts to identify the program elements that account for impacts entails a thorough understanding of key features along which programs vary, as well as current knowledge of elements that are surfacing in other pre-K evaluations as strong candidates for effectiveness factors. Also note: Longitudinal evaluations that address long-term impacts entail additional design considerations (e.g., selection of measures that are appropriate for a span of grades, sample attrition, and how to manage) that should be considered before launching a study of longer-term impacts.

This question is about sampling strategy. The first step is to consider whom your program serves and whether you want to document its effects on specific subgroups. If so, the next step is to determine whether to identify subgroups by participant characteristics (e.g., home language, special needs status, race and gender, degree of economic, or other hardship) or program features (e.g., part-time or full-time schedule; school-based classroom or other setting; number of years children spend in the program). You may want to know, for example, if all children in the program have equal access to well-implemented programs in high-quality settings or if access varies across participants. Subgroup studies require samples of sufficient size and representation as well as measurement tools that are suitable for all participants. Another critical task is identifying the right comparison group. Ideally, the evaluation will compare “apples to apples.” That is, it will compare children who do participate in the pre-K program with similar children who do not – or children who attend pre-K programs that do one thing or have certain features to those who attend programs that do another thing or have different features (e.g., school- vs. community-based programs; programs using one instructional model or curriculum versus another) – so that program participation or model is the main difference between the two groups. Random assignment designs are the best way to ensure apples-to-apples comparisons, but there are other commonly used and well-respected approaches to use when random assignment is not possible. Even with alternative approaches, the collection of pre-test information about children who do and do not participate in pre-K or who participate in different pre-K models prior to enrollment will strengthen your capacity to produce reliable conclusions.

Choosing measures for an evaluation study can be time-consuming and expensive. A good starting place is to familiarize yourself with data that has already been collected (e.g., administration data, school records, testing data, enrollment and financial forms, etc.) and assess its completeness and quality. Then, determine what is missing, keeping your key questions in mind. If your questions are about ensuring access to high-quality pre-K classrooms for all children, you will collect different data than if your questions are about designing classrooms to promote inclusive peer interactions or increasing the odds of third-grade reading proficiency. Draft tightly focused questions to avoid the temptation to collect a little data on a lot of things; instead, do the reverse: collect a lot of data on a few things. It is helpful to think about four buckets of data to collect: (a) child and family characteristics that may affect children’s responses to pre-K programs, (b) characteristics of teachers and other adults in the program who support implementation and program quality, (c) pre-K program design features and dosage, and (d) children’s outcomes tied to pre-K goals and theories of change. Questions that address pre-K implementation and quality monitoring will necessarily focus on pre-K program characteristics and dosage, but information on child and family characteristics will be helpful in interpreting the findings. Questions that address pre-K impacts require coordinating measure-ment from all three buckets. Impact questions that extend beyond outcomes at the end of the pre-K year entail additional>How will you get the data?

There are many more and various data sources and strategies for obtaining data than you might imagine. Existing administrative and program data (e.g., state, district, and school records, Quality Rating and Improvement System data, data from other systems such as child welfare services or income support offices) are a good place to start, although it is critical to assess the completeness and quality of these data. Prior and ongoing pre-k evaluation efforts in other locales offer fertile ground for data collection approaches to consider (see also the benefits of research-practice partnerships). There are cost, time, training, and intrusion trade-offs to consider when deciding whether to ask parents, teachers, coaches, or principals to provide data; to conduct direct assessments of children; to independently observe classrooms; and so on. In the end, you want to ensure that, having decided what to measure, you next decide how and from whom to collect those data to ensure maximum data quality.

Planning, launching, and seeing an evaluation effort to completion (and then considering its implications for policy, practice, and next stage research) are all essential parts of effective pre-K programming. The feasibility and quality of an evaluation depends on setting up the necessary infrastructure (e.g., implementing ethical research practices and procedures, ensuring adequate staff and clarifying roles, storing and archiving data, setting up advisory committees and review processes, producing reports, etc.). Forging partnerships with local universities and colleges can be helpful in this regard. Policy-practice-research partnerships can also create an evaluation team with a broader collective skill set and lend important external credibility to the findings your efforts produce. Pre-K programs and their evaluations affect many stakeholders, including families, teachers and support staff, principals, superintendents, and other education policymakers. Informing these stakeholder groups about your evaluation at the beginning of the process, and keeping them in the loop as the evaluation proceeds and begins to produce evidence, is not only best practice for strong community relations but will greatly enhance the chances that your evidence will be used for program improvement efforts. And that is, after all, the goal of providing a strong roadmap for your evaluation effort.

We have designed this roadmap for optimizing pre-K programs across the country so that children have a better chance of succeeding in school and beyond. This depends on building a stronger pre-K infrastructure that is based on sound evaluation science. We aim to provide sufficient detail and advice to ensure that future pre-K evaluations will get our country where it needs to go. We view this work as the equivalent of building a national highway. As social scientists who have engaged over many years with local and state policymakers and practitioners to conduct research about state and district pre-K programs, we have struggled with many of the questions addressed here. By sharing a roadmap and the knowledge gained from our experiences, we hope to contribute to construction of a strong, reliable “highway” infrastructure of pre-K programs that better meets our country’s educational and workforce goals.

The author/authors did not receive financial support from any firm or person for this article or from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article. Deborah Phillips is a member of the Research Advisory Board of the Committee for Economic Development. Beyond that affiliation, the authors are not currently an officer, director, or board member of any organization with a financial or political interest in this article.

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By Anna D. Johnson, Deborah A. Phillips, Owen Schochet
In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that one of the best ways to build a productive and prosperous society is to start early – that is, before children enter kindergarten – in building children’s foundation for learning, health, and positive behavior. From the U.S. Chambers of Commerce to the National Academy of Sciences, those planning our country’s workforce insist we will need more people, with more diverse skills, to meet the challenges of the future. In response, educators have focused on supporting learning earlier, recognizing that early learning establishes the foundation upon which all future skill development is constructed. Identifying and replicating the most important features of successful pre-K programs in order to optimize this potential is now a national imperative.
A wealth of evidence supports continued efforts to improve and scale up pre-kindergarten (pre-K) programs. This evidence is summarized in a companion report to this evaluation roadmap: “Puzzling It Out: The Current State of Scientific Knowledge on Pre-Kindergarten Effects”. Designing programs in a way that ensures meaningful, short- and long-term effects requires evaluation of programs over time. This goal was the focus of a series of meetings and discussions among a high-level group of practitioners and researchers with responsibility for and experience with designing, implementing and evaluating pre-k programs across the country. This report reflects the best thinking of this practitioner-research engagement effort.
As you prepare to evaluate a pre-K program, we invite you to draw upon this practice- and research-informed expertise to design early education settings that better support early learning and development. Your careful attention to evaluation will help early education systems from across the country identify the factors that distinguish effective programs from less effective ones and take constructive action to better meet our country’s educational and workforce goals.
We view this work as the equivalent of building a national highway. We must survey and compare local conditions, adapt designs to suit, map and share progress, and identify and resolve im-pediments so our country can get where it needs to go. This document is a guide – or roadmap – for those who are building this educational highway system; we hope it will ensure that we optimize our resources and learn from innovations along the way.
There is much good work to build upon. State-funded pre-K programs have been the focus of nearly two decades of evaluation research. This research has produced a large body of evidence on the immediate impacts of pre-K programs on children’s school achievement and pointed to some good bets about the inputs that produce these impacts.
But there is more you can do to improve existing programs and ensure that the next generation of programs builds upon this evidence. A central finding from the initial phase of pre-K evaluations is that state and local conditions vary widely, which makes it difficult to draw firm conclusions about the effectiveness of pre-K programs across locations. As the “Puzzling it Out” authors concluded, “We lack the kind of specific, reliable, consistent evidence we need to move from early models to refinements and redesigns”. We don’t have the evaluation evidence we need to apply lessons learned from first- to second-generation pre-K programs or from one district or state pre-K program to another. In short, we don’t have the information we need to inform the continuous improvement efforts called for in “Puzzling it Out” that are so essential to fulfilling the promise of pre-k for our nation’s children. It is this challenge that we take on as we attempt to build the next phase of evaluation ... By Anna D. Johnson, Deborah A. Phillips, Owen Schochet
In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that one of the best ways to build a productive and prosperous society is to start early – that is, before children enter kindergarten ... https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2018/10/03/schools-need-to-educate-our-sons-and-daughters-that-no-means-no/Schools need to educate our sons and daughters that no means nohttp://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/572658142/0/brookingsrss/topics/k12education/
Wed, 03 Oct 2018 19:01:54 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?p=540357

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By Andre M. Perry

“I was at the top of my class academically, busted my butt in school. Captain of the varsity basketball team.”

That was Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh defending himself last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee. In emotional testimony, he rebutted the charge of sexual assault levied at him by Christine Blasey Ford, who he knew when they both attended elite high schools in the Washington, D.C., area.

Being accused of sexual assault, regardless of when it happened, is horrific, especially if you didn’t do it, as Kavanaugh claims. It is to be hoped that the weeklong FBI investigation that has been ordered will shed some light on the truth, but in the meantime, Kavanaugh’s words speak volumes.

Attaining good grades in school should not excuse boys’ abhorrent behavior outside of it. Character is more about what you do with your smarts than acing tests or being admitted into Yale Law School, even if it is among the most selective in the country, as Kavanaugh protested. Grades, good or bad, aren’t a measure of character. Academic achievement is no guarantee of decency. Kavanaugh’s protestations to the contrary—and the corresponding implication that people who don’t have Ivy League certificates on their wall are somehow lesser—prove that high tuition can’t purchase integrity.

Nothing is more damning of an education’s utter failure than the fact that so many graduates, mostly male, receive good grades and yet don’t recognize (or accept) that no means no.

Third-grade teacher Elizabeth Kleinrock works hard to inculcate respect of boundaries in her charges. In an editorial for Teaching Tolerance, a social justice and anti-bias organization, she writes, “[O]ne of the first social emotional topics covered is the importance of keeping our hands and feet to ourselves and respecting others’ personal space.” But whether Kleinrock is an anomaly, or whether such lessons aren’t reinforced throughout boys’ school tenure, respecting personal space is a message that hasn’t been heard loud enough thus far. Some could argue that schools are not responsible for all of individuals’ social behaviors, and they’re not. However, schools do have a role to play in teaching basic notions of consent and respect for the word “no.”

Kavanaugh’s giant leap in logic—offering up his prestigious educational credentials in response to an allegation of sexual assault—only makes sense in a culture that teaches students to think of schools as jobs that pay in grades. I, too, have been guilty of comparing school to a workplace, bypassing social-emotional content for the currency that gets you into college. In this world, children supposedly meet their employment expectations if they get into college, and academic achievement is the most important indicator of who they are.

Clearly, a boy can go to school, get good grades, party irresponsibly, and assault women. As the saying goes, it’s possible to walk and chew gum at the same time. It should be obvious that grades can’t and shouldn’t be thought of as bail for boys’ criminal behavior, but they never tire of trying it anyway.

And this is far from the first time. In January 2015, Brock Turner, a Stanford University student, sexually assaulted an unconscious woman before being stopped by two men who happened to catch sight of him. In a letter to the judge who oversaw Turner’s sentencing, his father pleaded for leniency, writing that his son should not be punished severely for “20 minutes of action.”

Let alone that the act that Turner senior mischaracterized as “action” was actually rape, or that the number of minutes the assault lasted does not lessen the gravity or criminality of the behavior. What is perhaps most astounding was that Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky, a Stanford alum, seemed to be persuaded by that argument, sentencing Turner to a mere six months in prison instead of the minimum of two years prescribed by law (or the longer sentence asked for by the prosecution). The judge delivered the lightest of sentences, saying that he believed a longer stint behind bars would have a “severe impact” on Turner’s future. He did not seem to consider the impact of being raped on the victim, though she refused to be silenced. The rapist, a champion swimmer, a student at Stanford, a white man, ended up serving only three months before being released early for “good behavior.”

In this case, white privilege was put on trial, and white privilege won. Nothing could be clearer proof of this than a comparison with another case Persky had decided, in 2014, in which he gave three years to a Latino immigrant similarly convicted of sexual assault.

Too often, the treatment meted out to black and white men is starkly different. Indeed, Santa Clara County authorities didn’t release Turner’s mug shot till until 16 months after his arrest, something that feels inconceivable had he been black. But last week Kavanaugh trod in Clarence Thomas’ footsteps, the sitting Supreme Court justice who had been accused of sexual harassment by Anita Hill. As the outcome of both hearings show, both enjoyed the privilege afforded to powerful men.

We have too many cases that illustrate how the toxic “boys will be boys” mantra is passed down through our educational system to the world of politics—recall the “Access Hollywood” video that almost felled Donald Trump’s shot at the presidency, which was dismissed as “locker room talk”—and even to the legal system. Dismantling the structural sexism that privileges men begins in school. Schools are not businesses, a place of contractual transactions; they are the sites for much deeper personal development. We have to teach our boys that they are capable of decent, respectful behavior toward girls (and, indeed, other boys). We expect better of them, and if they fail to understand or accept that no means no, they will have to face the music.

It’s never too early to teach children about consent, Kleinrock says. “As a class, we define consent as ‘saying yes to letting someone do something,’” she writes in her editorial. It’s not sex they’re talking about, of course. “Instead, we talk about safe physical interactions that occur daily in the classroom and outside at recess, and how to communicate your personal boundaries with those around you.”

Though a vote on Kavanaugh’s full confirmation has been delayed pending the FBI investigation, we cannot tolerate any delay in teaching students that no does indeed mean no.

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By Andre M. Perry
“I was at the top of my class academically, busted my butt in school. Captain of the varsity basketball team.”
That was Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh defending himself last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee. In emotional testimony, he rebutted the charge of sexual assault levied at him by Christine Blasey Ford, who he knew when they both attended elite high schools in the Washington, D.C., area.
Being accused of sexual assault, regardless of when it happened, is horrific, especially if you didn’t do it, as Kavanaugh claims. It is to be hoped that the weeklong FBI investigation that has been ordered will shed some light on the truth, but in the meantime, Kavanaugh’s words speak volumes.
Attaining good grades in school should not excuse boys’ abhorrent behavior outside of it. Character is more about what you do with your smarts than acing tests or being admitted into Yale Law School, even if it is among the most selective in the country, as Kavanaugh protested. Grades, good or bad, aren’t a measure of character. Academic achievement is no guarantee of decency. Kavanaugh’s protestations to the contrary—and the corresponding implication that people who don’t have Ivy League certificates on their wall are somehow lesser—prove that high tuition can’t purchase integrity.
Nothing is more damning of an education’s utter failure than the fact that so many graduates, mostly male, receive good grades and yet don’t recognize (or accept) that no means no.
Third-grade teacher Elizabeth Kleinrock works hard to inculcate respect of boundaries in her charges. In an editorial for Teaching Tolerance, a social justice and anti-bias organization, she writes, “[O]ne of the first social emotional topics covered is the importance of keeping our hands and feet to ourselves and respecting others’ personal space.” But whether Kleinrock is an anomaly, or whether such lessons aren’t reinforced throughout boys’ school tenure, respecting personal space is a message that hasn’t been heard loud enough thus far. Some could argue that schools are not responsible for all of individuals’ social behaviors, and they’re not. However, schools do have a role to play in teaching basic notions of consent and respect for the word “no.”
Kavanaugh’s giant leap in logic—offering up his prestigious educational credentials in response to an allegation of sexual assault—only makes sense in a culture that teaches students to think of schools as jobs that pay in grades. I, too, have been guilty of comparing school to a workplace, bypassing social-emotional content for the currency that gets you into college. In this world, children supposedly meet their employment expectations if they get into college, and academic achievement is the most important indicator of who they are.
Clearly, a boy can go to school, get good grades, party irresponsibly, and assault women. As the saying goes, it’s possible to walk and chew gum at the same time. It should be obvious that grades can’t and shouldn’t be thought of as bail for boys’ criminal behavior, but they never tire of trying it anyway.
And this is far from the first time. In January 2015, Brock Turner, a Stanford University student, sexually assaulted an unconscious woman before being stopped by two men who happened to catch sight of him. In a letter to the judge who oversaw Turner’s sentencing, his father pleaded for leniency, writing that his son should not be punished severely for “20 minutes of action.”
Let alone that the act that Turner senior mischaracterized as “action” was actually rape, or that the number of minutes the assault lasted does not lessen the gravity or criminality of the behavior. What is perhaps most astounding was that Santa ... By Andre M. Perry
“I was at the top of my class academically, busted my butt in school. Captain of the varsity basketball team.”
That was Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh defending himself last week before the Senate Judiciary ... https://www.brookings.edu/research/are-states-providing-adequate-financial-literacy-education/Are states providing adequate financial literacy education?http://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/572609846/0/brookingsrss/topics/k12education/
Wed, 03 Oct 2018 13:03:17 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?post_type=research&p=539845

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By Matt Kasman, Benjamin Heuberger, Ross A. Hammond

Young people in America face an economic landscape marked by increasingly expensive higher education costs, more frequent job changes, and greater personal responsibility for retirement savings. It is more important than ever that youth are financially literate in order to navigate the many difficult decisions they will face during their lifetimes. Unfortunately, levels of financial literacy are persistently low among American youth.

We have conducted a review of large-scale public and private efforts to provide financial education to students from kindergarten through high school. The main goal of this review is to identify gaps in access to high-quality financial education. In order to do this, we first select a set of criteria to evaluate state-level financial education. These criteria fall into three broad categories:

State standards. Whether a state formally identifies student financial literacy as a goal and specifies concepts and skills that should be taught is a clear indication of how important the state considers this subject. We separately consider high school standards for financial literacy and standards for students prior to high school, which may have an impact on the development of foundational knowledge and skills.

Course requirements. State mandates that determine how financial education curricula are offered to students are a useful measure of how standards are implemented. We separately examine whether a course that covers core financial literacy concepts must be offered by schools, taken by students, and is primarily focused on financial literacy (e.g., is not just a unit in an economics course).

Teacher preparation. How a state prepares and equips teachers to provide financial education can affect student success in the classroom. Therefore, we consider whether states offer professional development and resources to teachers who provide financial literacy instruction.

Overall, we find large variation in state-level financial education efforts across the United States: a few states—like Utah, Missouri, and Tennessee—have strong financial literacy education policies, but most have significant room for improvement. Although there are almost certainly districts and schools that provide high-quality financial education in every state, these state-level standards and policies constitute a baseline for the amount and quality of instruction that students receive. Some evidence also suggests that more rigorous approaches to financial education at the state level are associated with more exposure to financial concepts and skills as well as greater financial literacy. We believe that our research provides policymakers with an outline of how they can improve financial education in their state and have a positive impact on students.

In addition, we describe a number of large-scale organizations, programs, and curricula that teach and promote youth financial literacy at the K-12 level. These represent a starting point for policymakers (at the state or local level), school administrators, or educators to improve youth financial literacy.

In a second report, we review the evidence on different approaches to youth financial literacy. Based on this analysis, we make recommendations for education program design and future research efforts. Our white paper can be found here.

Brookings is committed to quality, independence, and impact in all of its work. Activities supported by its donors reflect this commitment and the analysis and recommendations are solely determined by the scholar. Support for this publication was generously provided by Fidelity Investments.

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By Matt Kasman, Benjamin Heuberger, Ross A. Hammond
Young people in America face an economic landscape marked by increasingly expensive higher education costs, more frequent job changes, and greater personal responsibility for retirement savings. It is more important than ever that youth are financially literate in order to navigate the many difficult decisions they will face during their lifetimes. Unfortunately, levels of financial literacy are persistently low among American youth.
We have conducted a review of large-scale public and private efforts to provide financial education to students from kindergarten through high school. The main goal of this review is to identify gaps in access to high-quality financial education. In order to do this, we first select a set of criteria to evaluate state-level financial education. These criteria fall into three broad categories:
- State standards. Whether a state formally identifies student financial literacy as a goal and specifies concepts and skills that should be taught is a clear indication of how important the state considers this subject. We separately consider high school standards for financial literacy and standards for students prior to high school, which may have an impact on the development of foundational knowledge and skills. - Course requirements. State mandates that determine how financial education curricula are offered to students are a useful measure of how standards are implemented. We separately examine whether a course that covers core financial literacy concepts must be offered by schools, taken by students, and is primarily focused on financial literacy (e.g., is not just a unit in an economics course). - Teacher preparation. How a state prepares and equips teachers to provide financial education can affect student success in the classroom. Therefore, we consider whether states offer professional development and resources to teachers who provide financial literacy instruction.
A comparison of states across these criteria can be found below.
Download data from this graphic
Overall, we find large variation in state-level financial education efforts across the United States: a few states—like Utah, Missouri, and Tennessee—have strong financial literacy education policies, but most have significant room for improvement. Although there are almost certainly districts and schools that provide high-quality financial education in every state, these state-level standards and policies constitute a baseline for the amount and quality of instruction that students receive. Some evidence also suggests that more rigorous approaches to financial education at the state level are associated with more exposure to financial concepts and skills as well as greater financial literacy. We believe that our research provides policymakers with an outline of how they can improve financial education in their state and have a positive impact on students.
In addition, we describe a number of large-scale organizations, programs, and curricula that teach and promote youth financial literacy at the K-12 level. These represent a starting point for policymakers (at the state or local level), school administrators, or educators to improve youth financial literacy.
The full research brief can be found here.
In a second report, we review the evidence on different approaches to youth financial literacy. Based on this analysis, we make recommendations for education program design and future research efforts. Our white paper can be found here. ________________________________________________________
Brookings is committed to quality, independence, and impact in all of its work. Activities supported by its donors reflect this commitment and the analysis and recommendations are solely determined by the scholar. Support for this publication was generously provided by Fidelity Investments. By Matt Kasman, Benjamin Heuberger, Ross A. Hammond
Young people in America face an economic landscape marked by increasingly expensive higher education costs, more frequent job changes, and greater personal responsibility for retirement savings.